In this special focus section, Windows & .NET Magazine targets Microsoft's latest server OS: Windows Server 2003. Find out what Brian Valentine, Senior Vice President of Microsoft's Windows Division, and others have to say about developing the new OS. Then, drill down into how to establish multiple-forest trusts, and discover how to minimize administrative overhead with the Volume Shadow Copy Service (VSS) backup utility. Learn how to write simple scripts that take advantage of new and improved command-line tools, and find out how to configure and manage terminal servers with Group Policy Objects (GPOs). Finally, investigate Microsoft IIS 6.0's new architecture and learn how to install this server.
With Windows Server 2003 development coming to a close earlier this year, I had the chance to sit down with Brian Valentine, Senior Vice President of Microsoft's Windows Division, and discuss the company's most complex and customer-driven Windows Server version to date. Here's what Valentine had to say about Windows Server 2003's development, process changes at Microsoft, and the future of Windows.
Paul Thurrott (PT): How did Windows Server 2003's development compare with the development of previous Windows versions? As the product gets more complex, do you see an increase in the development time line with each release or simply an increase in the number of developers devoted to Windows?
Brian Valentine (BV): Windows 2000 was built with a lot of sweat, energy, and passion, but we didn't have a good process. For efficiency, tools, and productivity, I'd give us a fairly low score. We built a great product, but the energy required was tremendous.
Now, we have a much better process that lets us do more complex things and do better things faster. What we've concentrated on most since Windows 2000 was completed is how to move the company from technology-centric thinking into customer scenario—based thinking.
If Microsoft walked in on one of our key enterprise customers 10 years ago, the customer would have explained its business problem and we would have offered Windows and Microsoft Office as the solution. But customers aren't looking for products— they're trying to solve specific business problems, and they need end-to-end solutions. Just offering them Windows and Office won't work today; we've learned that over time. We've taken customer scenarios, feedback, and experience and mapped them directly to the development process.
One example is the Watson technology and the customer-feedback loop that it enables. It's a direct connection to the customer, and we can pull feedback into the product immediately. You get a dialog box when an application or the system crashes, and you can use that dialog box to send a report back to Microsoft. We track these problems all around the world. If we've seen the bug before, we can say, "Here's the fix." You can subscribe to Auto Update and get the fix automatically. This process is just a small component of the overall feedback loop, but it's what we needed to do to address customers' needs.
We've also got a good core set of customers—the Joint Development Program [JDP] partners and others—whom we interact with daily. They sit down with us at design time and help us make priority decisions about which features and fixes need to be in the product. At end-of-process—where we are now with Windows Server 2003—they deploy the product early and make sure it's tested in a production environment, as if it were already shipping. All this maps directly back to the development process and affects how we deliver the products.
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