Enabling Faster Application Creation, Easier System Management
Eric Rudder says Microsoft is listening to customer concerns.
by John Zipperer

PDC, October 29, 2003

Enterprise IT teams will be creating (and fine-tuning) applications and services for their systems more easily and accurately than they can do today. That's the message Microsoft was giving to attendees at its Professional Developers Conference this week in Los Angeles. If this vision of the benefits of Microsoft's upcoming Whidbey version of Visual Studio .NET is realized, that should favorably impact IT budgets and schedules, which should help simplify administration in the process.

Eric Rudder, senior vice president for servers and tools at Microsoft, said his company has heard from its customers that they wanted to make application and service creation faster, quicker, and more secure. "We're listening," he said. "We understand that the road to WinFX [Longhorn APIs] is a long way, and people have a lot of code in Win32."

Rudder, who works to build synergies between Windows and Windows Server System offerings, repeated a wish list he has heard from his customers, including the desire to support mobile devices, difficulty making secure code, the need to interoperate with technology from other vendors, and frustration that "this stuff breaks down when I deploy it."

Microsoft's approach to answering those needs will have an obvious benefit for developers, making the integration of their development tools into the rest of an enterprise's systems more complete and more intuitive, but the effect of that on a business's overall IT operation should also be beneficial. Staff resources can be devoted to higher-value activities than line-by-line reviews, writing thousands of unnecessary lines of code, and—most important—less follow-up to fix faulty applications and services that can mess up networked systems.

"We promise to deliver a breakthrough platform," Rudder said, laying out the road map of Microsoft's server and application rollouts over the next couple years, leading up to Longhorn server. In the meantime, he suggests his customers should focus on fundamentals and pay attention to the continued growth and integration around the Web services and devices arenas.

For more on Whidbey, see "Climbing the Road to Whidbey," an exclusive interview with Ari Bixhorn, in the December issue of Visual Studio Magazine, Windows Server System Magazine's sister publication.

About the Author
John Zipperer is Executive Editor of Windows Server System Magazine.