Microsoft has long been known for keeping its technology under tight wraps, but at a presentation here Wednesday at the InfoWorld Web Services Conference, Eric Rudder, the company's senior vice president of platforms and development, revealed a more open side of the software maker.
Microsoft is tackling its .Net initiative - which includes applications the company is creating for building and delivering software and services over the Internet - with a new development philosophy, based at least in part on tapping industry-standard software used by a variety of vendors, Rudder stressed.
"I think it's important that we continue to evolve Web services in a standard way," Rudder said.
Microsoft has, for example, let developers write code in a variety of programming languages within its new Visual Studio .Net developer environment, offering more choices for developers beyond Microsoft languages such as Visual Basic.
Ultimately, Rudder said, Microsoft aims to make Web services based on the XML and built with its tools to work with competing services from other vendors. He said this interoperability will be possible in a way that is similar to how users can send and receive e-mail with different systems, because each competing system uses common protocols.
"The work that we're doing in Web services will actually evolve a lot like the e-mail system," Rudder said.
One example of its effort to allow users of its software to interoperate with other systems is Microsoft's user authentication service Passport, which subscribers can use to log on to multiple Web sites that support Passport without re-entering their personal information. The company has announced that it will incorporate the Kerberos security technology, developed at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, in Passport so that it can work with other authentication systems that also include Kerberos.
Next in line, Rudder said, is making Passport work with the emerging Liberty Alliance project, led by Sun Microsystems, to create a common technology for authenticating users on the Internet.
"It's hard to think about how Passport is going to work with Liberty," Rudder said. "I think eventually consumers will demand that we make these systems work together."
In a move last year to foster interoperability among applications from different vendors, the company submitted two underlying components of .Net to a European standards body. The Common Language Infrastructure (CLI) and related programming language, C#, were approved late last year as standards by the European Computer Manufacturers Association. CLI is designed to allow programmers to build Web services and other applications in a variety of programming languages, from Microsoft and other vendors.
The IDG News Service is a Network World affiliate.
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