Microsoft Parades 'Whitehorse' at DevDay Kick-Off

NEW YORK — Microsoft kicked off its 30-city DevDays tour here on Monday with a demonstration of the "Whitehorse" modeling tools that it plans to integrate into the next version of its Visual Studio tool suite.

Whitehorse is just one of a number of new features that Microsoft is planning on including in its Visual Studio "Whidbey" release that is due out by the end of calendar 2004. Microsoft has said it also will include an updated version of its .Net Compact Framework; a revised version of its ASP.Net development environment; and support for new features in the languages that comprise its developer environment.

Read "What's On Tap for 'Whidbey'"

And More on Whitehorse

Whidbey is currently in alpha test. Developers are expecting the first full-fledged beta to launch in June.

See "Developers Expect Whidbey Beta 1 in June"

But Whidbey wasn't the only product that Microsoft executives and other invited speakers put through its paces before a packed house of several hundred developers in New York. The speakers also showed off BizTalk 2004, Microsoft's forthcoming update to its integration server, which the company has said will launch on March 2; InfoPath 2003, Microsoft's e-forms tool; SQL Server 2000 Reporting Services; and Visual Studio Tools for Office 2003.

Andrew Brust, president of Progressive Systems Consulting and a Microsoft regional director, emphasized in the morning DevDays keynote address that Microsoft is making its Visual Studio environment a more tightly integrated element of a growing number of its core products.

The morning's other keynote presenter — Stephen Forte, chief technology officer and cofounder of Corzen Inc., a financial services consulting firm — demonstrated the alpha version of Whitehorse.

Forte described Whitehorse as a set of integrated, model-driven design tools for the design, deployment and maintenance of "service-oriented distributed systems." He showed how developers can use Whitehorse to link components graphically, add methods and then create code.

"It doesn't sound that different from UML (Unified Modeling Language). But Whitehorse is a two-way street," he explained.

Whitehorse updates design documents as programmers code. And if they modify the design document, the change is automatically reflected back in the code, Forte said. At the same time, Whitehorse simplifies deployment by detecting settings on machines in advance, thus alleviating the need for trial-and-error code deployment, he said.

What Forte didn't say during his keynote, but mentioned on his Weblog is that Microsoft's System Definition Model (SDM) is at the core of Whitehorse's architecture. SDM is the foundation of Microsoft's Dynamic Systems Initiative, which is its utility-computing products/strategy.

Check Out Forte's Blog Entry on Whitehorse

"The System Definition Model is a layered model that can be used to represent the structure of applications systems, the application hosting environment, the network and operating systems environment, and the hardware," blogged Forte.

"Whitehorse focuses on the top two layers of the model, namely the applications layer and the applications host layer," he explained. "The application layer allows the user to describe the structure and behavior of application systems where design can be synchronized with code, while the application host later allows the user to describe a model of the application hosts."

Microsoft has a growing audience for its Whidbey and Whitehorse tools, according to the DevDay presenters. Currently, there are an estimated 2.5 million-plus .Net developers and 70 million-plus systems that are running Microsoft's .Net Framework, the presenters said.

Copyright © 2004 Ziff Davis Media Inc. All Rights Reserved. Originally appearing in Dev Source.