Opinion: Data source neutrality and designer/programmer collaboration highlight
PDC introductions.
Twenty-one years ago, the first formal software recommendation that
I ever wrote was an in-house memo recommending our companys adoption
of a 2-year-old product (barely out of diapers) called AutoCAD. That
PC-based technical drawing tool had a solid foundation of
floating-point data representation for drawings over a wide range of
real-world size, combined with ease of customization with its internal
programming tools, but the deal-maker--as I presented it at that
time--was in the ability of other applications to generate ASCII files
in the format that AutoCAD could render and edit as drawings.
That was 12 years before the 1996 presentation of the first
draft of
whats
now XML, but its been worth the wait to see this core
idea of inter-application data exchange turn into the basic premise of
future enterprise information management. During that transition,
AutoCADs vendor hasnt always been
an
exemplar of openness--but wherever I look, things are moving in
that direction, not only at
Autodesk
but also at Microsoft.
I expected, back in the 1980s, soon to see custom in-house
applications performing engineering calculations and generating AutoCAD
drawings as their output, or taking drawing files as input and
producing bills of material and other project summaries and design
analyses. Last week, though, I saw AutoCAD used in a demonstration at
Microsofts
Professional Developers Conference in Los Angeles that went beyond
these hopes, automating not only the draftsmans duties but also the
component buyers task of going out for bids on alternative materials
or other customizations--and also feeding directly into visual
presentations to the prospective online buyer. From design
requirement, to drawing, to end-to-end supply chain integration is a
path that Ive long hoped to follow with mainstream off-the-shelf
systems.
In his
opening
keynote at PDC, Chairman and Chief Software Architect Bill Gates
talked about the companys entry into its third generation of XML,
progressing from data storage through in-core data representation to
the fully integrated use of XML for data movement throughout both the
core and the application stack. The implications for programmer
productivity, and the resulting ease of delivering data in the way
thats most relevant to what the user is doing and in what context, are
massive. Gates made the two-pronged promise of "rich links and rich
replication" as the benefits of what he called "the deep idea of
schematized information": Im not an easy mark for any vendors
promises, but what I saw at PDC strongly suggested that these are
phrases backed up by solid engineering and careful thought about
developer and end-user benefits.
I was further reminded of my 1984 AutoCAD memo when Microsoft VP
Chris Capossela told the PDC audience that a
virtual
folder in Microsoft Vista is merely an XML file. Before he could
even finish explaining the benefits, the developer audience drowned him
out with applause--they immediately "got it," realizing without further
hand-holding that their own applications could use sophisticated task
knowledge or user-driven logic to assemble and apply arbitrarily
complex criteria for grouping and presenting resources to the user.
Also well-received was the notion of dragging a document or other
resource icon into various regions of the screen to "paint" that system
artifact, as Capossela put it, with corresponding metadata.
The
meta-question of metadata--whos going to take the time to make
those associations?--was well-answered. As I said, not only technical
functionality but practical usability were jointly addressed by the PDC
presentations.
Offering PDC attendees more immediate gratification were Microsofts
rollouts of its data access integration technology,
LINQ,
for managed-code application writers and its
Expression
family of illustration and Web-design tools--which radically
streamlines the interaction between those who determine the look and
those who define the underlying behavior of a site.
All of these technology introductions that Ive discussed here
address the question of why developers should continue to favor the
Microsoft platform as the place where they work and as the target for
what they produce. By that definition, or for that matter by just about
any definition, one would have to call this PDC a great success
Tell me what you want to see from Microsoft, and from other platform
definers and tool builders, at
peter_coffee@ziffdavis.com
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