Microsoft to Develop New Programming Standards
Faced with increasing pressure from the developer community to get its API house in order, Microsoft plans to develop three programming standards that center on core API-level disciplines. These standards are part of Microsoft's long-term strategic API vision, Distributed interNet Architecture (DNA). The three programming standards slated for development are COM+ (the next major release of Microsoft's distributed component object model—DCOM—architecture), Forms+ (an umbrella standard for various Microsoft HTML technologies, including XML), and Storage+ (the long awaited unification of the SQL Server, Exchange Server, and Windows NT storage subsystems).
Storage+, in particular, looks interesting. With Storage+, software developers will be able to more easily create applications that execute independently from the underlying data store.
Microsoft has already laid much of the groundwork for this standard in the Object Linking and Embedding Database (OLE DB) technology. Later this year, Microsoft plans to release an OLE DB Partners CD-ROM. This CD-ROM will include storage providers for a variety of popular platforms, including Exchange Server and Lotus Notes.
Will Microsoft's three new standards improve the quality of life for software developers? Probably not. But these standards will provide developers with clearly defined boundaries, and the standards will let them better understand Microsoft's long-term strategic vision when they are selecting APIs.
—Craig Barth>
NT 5.1?
With the August release of Windows NT 5.0 beta 2, it seems as if Microsoft has actually announced NT 5.1. Beta 1 and beta 2 are that different from each other. Most, but not all, of the news is good.
Here's the bad news. Many network administrators want a Dynamic Host Configuration Protocol (DHCP) server that can understudy the main DHCP server, automatically issuing IP addresses from a given scope if the main DHCP server fails. This essential network fault tolerance isn't possible under NT 4.0, and Microsoft promised to fill that gap in NT 5.0. Microsoft has kept its promise, but at a high cost. NT 5.0's DHCP servers will provide fault-tolerant DHCP server services, but only in an NT cluster. NT 5.0, Enterprise Edition's high price tag will exclude many customers from getting the benefits of DHCP fault tolerance.
Here's the good news. NT 5.0 will include many new tools to simplify deploying NT. If you want to deploy NT 4.0 on many machines in a network, you must spend lots of time installing NT individually on each machine, purchase third-party tools to mass deploy NT, or follow the dangerous practice of developing one NT image and propagating it over the network. (This practice can create duplicate security IDs-SIDs-on different machines.) With NT 5.0, you can use SysPrep to prepare a preconfigured version of NT—copy of NT that is 99 percent installed, save for username and machine name. Then, you use a tool such as Ghost Software's GHOST to copy the disk image and a small amount of scripting information to users' machines. The first time users start their machines, the system adjusts the SIDs and personalizes the machines. The machines are ready to use in just a couple of minutes.
Another deployment improvement in NT 5.0 is that you can avoid the two-step process of first installing NT and then applying a service pack atop it. Instead, you simply incorporate the revised service pack files into the i386 installation files. Service packs will be easier to apply to already installed NT 5.0 systems as well. Service packs will be easier to push out to desktops and will not require reinstallation every time you change the system. Both of these capabilities are welcome improvements.
Keeping NT up and running will be simpler with NT 5.0. With NT 5.0, you can press F8 at boot-up to activate a number of safe boot modes similar to the ones in Windows 98 and Windows 95. And Microsoft claims that it has fixed 50 NT 4.0 bugs severe enough to cause blue screens, and Microsoft will even include some of these fixes in a future service pack for NT 4.0.
Some of the biggest changes in NT 5.0 concern how the mechanics of Zero Administration for Windows (ZAW) will work. The new ZAW plans call for tools that are far less network bandwidth- and server-intensive than the ones originally outlined more than a year ago. "We went around to clients and presented our vision of where we thought ZAW would go, and our clients told us, 'we're being asked to reduce the number of servers in our organization and you want us to put more in to make ZAW work?' So we rethought how to solve the problem," said Dan Plastina, ZAW Group Program manager.
In its new incarnation, ZAW focuses on a few specific tasks: getting a fresh copy of an operating system (OS) on a new or recycled machine, deploying applications to that machine, and rolling out new versions of applications to that machine. As before, IntelliMirror is the keystone technology for ZAW, but the specifics are changing. IntelliMirror is still a client-side technology that caches data from servers, but IntelliMirror isn't as automated as it was first conceived to be. Now, you must use Explorer's user interface (UI) to specify which files IntelliMirror needs to cache. (For an overview of ZAW and IntelliMirror, see Darren Mar-Elia, "Application Management in NT 5.0," April 1998, and Mark Minasi, "Zero Administration for Windows," December 1997. Information about IntelliMirror, ZAW, and other features in NT 5.0 beta 2.0 will appear in a future issue of Windows NT Magazine.)
In Microsoft's never-ending quest for the perfect UI, the company has added many features to NT 5.0's Explorer. One feature is My Network Places, a logical alternative to both mapping drives and managing Remote Access Service (RAS) connections. This folder replaces NT 4.0's Network Neighborhood and the dial-up phonebook. Microsoft has also added many of Win98's useful UI features, including greater use of auto-complete and a recently used documents view in the standard File Open dialog box.
Thousands of developers and systems administrators will receive NT 5.0 beta 2. Their input will help Microsoft move toward its next goal: NT 5.0 beta 3. NT 5.0 is clearly still vaporwarea work in progress. But previewing beta 2 and listening to the Microsoft officials speak about it gives you a strong feeling that the vapor is starting to condense.
—Mark Minasi