Xen On Track to Debut as 'X Omega'

By mid-year, Microsoft plans to make its XML programming language – currently code-named "Xen," and soon to be renamed "C Omega" -- available to researchers and academics.

At the same time, Microsoft's Research division is making the new language available to product teams inside the company for possible use or inclusion in forthcoming products.

That's according to Wolfram Schulte, manager of Microsoft Research's Foundations of Software Engineering group, and one of the principal stewards of Xen.

Check Out Schulte's Web Page

Read an Overview of Xen Here

And More on the Inner Workings of Xen From ExtremeTech

"In the XML world, we see many new languages popping up, but most don't have enough library support," Schulte said. "That's why we built (Xen) as an extension (to C#). For developers, it will be as easy as programming with a new library."

A little more than two years ago, Schulte and Webdata team technical lead Erik Meijer started up a skunk-works project to examine ways that data integration can be built directly into programming languages, Schulte said. The pair wrote a proposal for a new language called X# that would link SQL, XML and object-oriented programming models.

In February 2002, the Webdata incubation team inside Microsoft decided to take the language specification and run with it, Schulte said. The team completed a research prototype of the language in April 2003.

This prototype is being furthered in two ways inside Microsoft.

First, Microsoft Research in Cambridge, UK, which is working in conjunction with the University of Cambridge U.K., is adding a new communications model to Xen that will make it easier for programmers to write Web services and multithreaded applications using the new language. (The multithreaded extension comes from Polyphonic C#, a C# derivative, and also Xen extension).

Read More About Polyphonic C# Here

Within the next six months, Microsoft Research Cambridge plans a research release of Xen. When it goes live, Schulte said, the language will likely be called X Omega (Note: Microsoft will use the symbol for omega, which is the last letter in the Greek alphabet). Other research organizations and universities will be able to play with X Omega, but won't be allowed to use it to develop real-world applications, Schulte added.

At the same time, various product teams inside Microsoft will have access to the X Omega code and concepts, via the Webdata team. Microsoft's WebData team is part of the SQL Server product unit, and is charged with delivering data-access technologies that are incorporated in a variety of Microsoft products from across the company.

The Longhorn team, SQL team and Visual Studio teams are among those most likely to take elements of Xen and find potential ways of incorporating them, Schulte said. While none of these teams is expected to release anything that incorporates X Omega code or ideas for a while, the Indigo communications subsystem folks are quite interested in Xen, according to Schulte.

"There is lots of interest inside and outside of Microsoft in (Xen)," Schulte noted. "Researchers in the language-design community are really interested."

(This is an edited version of an article which appeared in the January 23, 2004, issue of the Microsoft Watch newsletter.)

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