Microsoft To Hand Over Early Whidbey, Yukon Code At PDC

During a meeting with CRN on Tuesday at company headquarters, Microsoft executives confirmed that the company will make available another "private beta" of Yukon, its next generation database, and early beta code of its next version of Visual Studio, code-named Whidbey, to attendees of PDC 2003 beginning Oct. 26.

Additionally, Microsoft will offer up a technical preview of Longhorn, its next version of Windows, at the conference, executives said. Microsoft will demonstrate an early incarnation of Longhorn's new user interface, but that GUI - code named "Aero," will not be distributed with the preview as once expected, sources said. (See story.)

Finally, Microsoft will also release at PDC as planned software developer kits (SDKs) for Longhorn and the Next Generation Secure Computing Base planned for Longhorn, executives confirmed. The NGSCB code, first demonstrated at WinHec in May, is designed to make Windows more fail-safe and secure from hackers and virus writers.

While the company will offer up bits and bytes for developers, it's unclear how usable the code will be in either test or production environments.

It's also unclear to what extent the Yukon, Whidbey and Longhorn releases represent true development milestones for Microsoft. Traditionally, the company has referred to pre-production test releases as alpha, beta or release candidates.

But lately, executives have been tossing about terms such as "technical preview" and "private beta" to describe the state of product development for its database, tools and platform software.

For instance, executives would not define how the second "private beta" of Yukon due at PDC 2003 would differ from the first private beta released during the summer. However, Microsoft SQL Server Vice President Gordon Mangione said the company will ship public betas for both Yukon and Whidbey during the first half of 2004.

The first private beta went to about 2,000 partners and customers in mid July. The next will be available to 6,000 additional people, including all PDC attendees, Mangione said.

And Microsoft confirmed this week that an earlier announcement about Whidbey being released into beta -- made by a Microsoft executive at VSLive in late July - was incorrect.

Prashant Sridharan, Microsoft's product manager for Visual Studio.NET, told CRN on Tuesday that the statement was incorrect. However, he declined to specify additional details. At least one developer with the code in house said it is currently marked "alpha."

In related news, Microsoft is readying an extensibility framework to help ISVs link third-party lifecycle management tools with the next version of Visual Studio, ridharan, said.

In the next release, Whidbey, Microsoft will provide an extensibility model so that lifecycle tools vendors can share data with one another in a standard way.

"Today if your project management tool wants to share data with your source code control tool, that project management vendor has to strike an agreement with your source code control vendor," Sridharan said. "That's how they interact."

With an extensibility model built into Whidbey, Microsoft will attempt to get "an industry of lifecycle tools vendors to come together and say this is how we want to cooperate with one another" by providing a tool for interoperability, Sridharan said.

Lifecycle tools include tools for project management, application design and source code control. Sridharan said Microsoft will continue to leverage partners for these tools rather than build them into Visual Studio directly.

As CRN previously reported, Microsoft is moving forward with its plans to provide a design tool for Web services through its Whitehorse project, code that will be included in Whidbey, Sridharan confirmed.

"We're building a Web services design tool in Whidbey," he said. "Think of it like this: as easy as VB is for a developer, this design tool will be as easy as that for people building service-oriented architectures. We're trying to apply the principles of VB and apply that to the design of Web services architectures."

Barbara Darrow contributed to this report.