Microsoft Ships Windows.Net Beta 3

The Windows.Net beta 3 code, which was officially released on Friday, is the server complement of Windows XP and incorporates the company's new .Net Framework and native support for significant protocols such as XML, Simple Object Access Protocol (SOAP), Web Services Description Language (WSDL) and Universal Description, Discovery and Integration (UDDI). This will enable the Windows server, for the first time, to participate in the Web services market.

The Windows.Net server, for instance, will incorporate the .Net Framework and UDDI code for locating Microsoft and other Web services on the Internet. "We will include UDDI so now the Windows server will have the ability to go out and look for Web services," said Bob O'Brien, a group product manager at Microsoft.

The target date for the Release Candidate 1 of Windows.Net is early 2002 and the server, formerly code-named Whistler, will ship during the first half of 2002, O'Brien said.

The four servers, including a new Web server offering, will also offer features and enhancements not related to Microsoft's .Net initiative, including cross-forest authentication for Active Directory, improved clustering and security. For example, the enterprise edition, formerly known as advanced server, now offers four-node clustering, up from two-node in Windows 2000, while the high-end data-center edition will offer eight-node clustering, O'Brien said.

The Windows.Net server will also offer improved security in the form of default, locked-down mode in the Internet Information Server 6.0 code that ships with the server, O'Brien said.

Pricing for the four Windows.Net servers has not yet been announced.