Beyond Binary

Microsoft's Mark Bolger demonstrates the Surface's multitouch user interface.

(Credit: Ina Fried/CNET News.com)

The long-awaited software developer kit for the Surface tabletop computer will be made available to those attending Microsoft's Professional Developer Conference at the end of the month.

Microsoft made that pledge on its PDC Web site, as part of a listing for a session focused on writing Surface applications.

"Hear about the unique attributes of Microsoft Surface computing, dive into vision-based object recognition and core controls like ScatterView, and learn how the Surface SDK aligns with the multitouch developer roadmap for Windows 7," Microsoft said, in promoting the session. "Attendees will receive access to the Microsoft Surface SDK."

Microsoft has been promising for some time to open up Surface development beyond the select group of companies that have been working with early launch partners such as AT&T and Starwood hotels.

The company has also promised multitouch will be a part of the Windows 7 interface, but has yet to detail how that will work.

Microsoft CEO Steve Ballmer on Thursday promised it won't be long before the world gets to meet what he is calling "Windows Cloud"--something that acts like Windows but operates over the Internet.

"Just as we have an operating system for the PC, for the phone, and for the server, we need a new operating system that runs in the Internet," Ballmer said Thursday in a speech before France's CIGREF (Club Informatique des Grandes Entreprises Françaises). "I bet we'll call it Windows something. We're going to announce it in four weeks. We might even have a trademark by then. So, for today I'll call it Windows Cloud. And Windows Cloud will be a place where you can run arbitrary applications up in the Internet that runs .NET."

CEO Steve Ballmer

(Credit: Microsoft )

Ballmer first mentioned the "Windows Cloud" name in a speech in London earlier this week. Microsoft is expected to unveil "Windows Cloud" (whether it bears that name or not) at its Professional Developers Conference, which takes place the last week of October in Los Angeles.

Microsoft has already unveiled its Live Mesh, a consumer-based service that synchronizes data across multiple devices. The software maker has promised that application developers will also be able to write Mesh-based applications and that the tools to do so will be detailed at the PDC. Windows Cloud appears to go significantly beyond that, however.

The move into cloud computing, Ballmer said, will require a shift in Microsoft's overall developer tools, Ballmer said on Friday. "Part of that means putting .Net in the browser, which we've done with our Silverlight technology," Ballmer said, according to a transcript posted on Microsoft's Web site. "And yet I don't think the whole world lives in a browser. PC applications have better user interface, and you can integrate them more. Browser applications run on non-Windows machines, and they're easier to manage. We need to bring the benefits of both of those things together on Windows, and through our Silverlight technology permit the targeting of other systems."

Ballmer also talked about desktop Windows at the event, first addressing Vista and then talking briefly about its successor, Windows 7.

"Windows Vista is a product where we made some very conscious choices for some very good reasons that have been very painful," Ballmer said. However, he said that the company has now shipped about 180 million copies of the operating system.

"Deployments in large corporations are now ramping up quite nicely across the world, but in the enterprise I would say we are still earlier."

He then promised that Windows 7, as the company has been saying, will be compatible with Vista.

"No more breaks," Ballmer said. "So, any work we're doing together with you or you're doing on your own to test your applications for Vista compatibility will also apply to Windows 7. We hope you choose to deploy with Vista, but all of that work is good, important work for the long term."

Microsoft plans to release a pre-beta version of Windows 7 to developers attending the PDC.

He also said that Vista has lived up to its target of being, statistically speaking, the most secure version of Windows to date.

Ballmer also talked about the shifting expectations people have for software, pointing to the MySpace generation as one that expects people to have social capabilities built-in to their software.

"The young people you hire today, they grow up on MySpace, Facebook, and instant messaging," Ballmer said. "They grow up with a fundamental notion that applications have knowledge of other people. In order for business applications to go that direction, we need to provide fundamental platform operating system services that really provide what I might call the social web or the social graph."

Microsoft CEO Steve Ballmer told a crowd in London that Microsoft this month will show off its new development environment for Internet-based applications--what he dubbed "Windows Cloud."

Steve Ballmer

Although the term--which may or may not be the product's actual name--is new, Microsoft has been widely expected to unveil its cloud-based developer platform at the Professional Developer Conference at the end of October. Ballmer's comments, reported on Wednesday by IDG News Service, are the latest in a series of mentions of a cloud-based developer platform. Ballmer was asked at last week's Churchill Club speech about Red Dog, the company's rumored answer to Amazon's EC2 service.

Ballmer declined to comment about "Red Dog," but promised Microsoft would have much more to say at the company's PDC. Ballmer also said Red Dog and other cloud computing efforts are key to winning the battle for developers, particularly Web developers.

"I think at the end of the day, cloud computing will be dictated by the interests and the degree to which you capture the imagination of developers," Ballmer said.

Microsoft unveiled its Live Mesh effort earlier this year for consumers, but promised that developers would be able to write their own Mesh-enabled applications, with tools coming at the October PDC. Microsoft executives have recently suggested an even broader look at Microsoft's cloud-based strategy will come at the event.

In his London speech, Ballmer also reportedly said Microsoft will soon allow "light editing" of Office documents over the Web, again according to the IDG report.

"That's all I can say on that," Ballmer was quoted as saying. "Otherwise, we have no drum-roll announcement in a month."

Microsoft's Office Live Workspace currently allows for online storage and viewing of documents, but not the editing offered by Google Docs and other online services.

A Microsoft representative was not immediately able to confirm, or comment on, Ballmer's remarks.

Update: They did issue the following statement:

As we've discussed publicly, Microsoft is investing heavily in its Software (plus) Services vision, particularly as it relates to the services platform to deliver a set of solutions that address our customer's needs. In addition to our current, widely adopted service-based technologies, such as Microsoft Online Services and Office Live Workspaces, we are working with many of our customers, partners and our broad developer community to understand their needs for extensible, scalable services platforms. We have publicly discussed a road map of commitments for our services strategy, most notably from Ray Ozzie at MIX 08 and the Financial Analyst Meeting. We are excited to talk more about our progress and opportunities for customers and partners at the Professional Developers Conference in a few weeks, but we don't have any further details to share at this time.

Amazon said on Wednesday that it plans to offer its cloud computing customers the option of running Microsoft's Windows Server operating system as well as its SQL Server database.

Starting sometime this fall, Amazon said that customers of its EC2 (Elastic Compute Cloud) service will be able to run Windows, in addition to the Unix-based options currently available. Amazon is currently conducting a private beta test of the new Microsoft-based options.

"The ability to run a Windows environment within Amazon EC2 has been one of our most requested features, and we are excited to be able to provide this capability," Amazon said in a blog posting. "Our goal is to support any and all of the programming models, operating systems and database servers that you need for building applications on our cloud computing platform."

The company said that EC2 running Windows Server or SQL Server will be useful for running ASP.NET Web sites, media transcoding and other Windows-based applications.

Microsoft, meanwhile, is expected to talk more about the ability to write applications directly to its Live Mesh service at its Professional Developers Conference, which takes place at the end of this month.

Microsoft confirmed on Wednesday that developers attending a Microsoft conference next month will get an early version of Windows 7 to take home.

(Credit: Microsoft)

In a blog posting, Microsoft said that those at the Professional Developers Conference, scheduled for Oct. 27-30 in Los Angeles, will get a pre-beta version of Windows 7.

"With Windows 7 at PDC2008 you will see advances across the full range of Windows--including the kernel, networking, hardware and devices, and user-interface," Microsoft said.

One thing that won't be part of Windows 7--as first confirmed by CNET News earlier this week--are the e-mail, photo-editing and movie-making applications that were part of Windows Vista. Microsoft plans to make those available as downloadable Windows Live applications.

Late 2009 is the tentative target date for a general release of Windows 7.

The blog posting as well as several new Windows 7-related sessions were noted earlier on Wednesday by ZDNet blogger Mary Jo Foley. Screenshots of recent internal builds of Windows 7 have also been making the rounds on various enthusiast sites.

Although a public test version of Windows 7 is still at least a month away, Microsoft has hit a key internal milestone, according to several Windows enthusiast sites.

Several sites are reporting that Microsoft has hit the M3 (Milestone 3) stage, with the builds being distributed internally within Microsoft, as well as to some key partners. A Microsoft representative declined to comment beyond what has been said on the company's Engineering Windows 7 blog.

ZDNet's Mary Jo Foley said that she has taken a peek at the new build, thanks to a source of hers. Foley said that it appears to be fairly stable, at least in her short time with the software, and also noted that it didn't appear to be a major departure from Windows Vista.

She noted that the internal Paint and WordPad programs have a user interface similar to the "ribbon" approach used by Office 2007.

On his UX Evangelist site, Stephen Chapman posted what appears to be a screenshot of the new Paint program.

As for what this all means, Foley said that this may be the last key internal milestone before some sort of public preview version, possibly in time for the Professional Developers Conference set for late October. A full beta 1 version might be ready by year's end, she said.

The real speculation game has centered around when a final version of 7 will ship. Microsoft CEO Steve Ballmer has said he wants the release out by late 2009, although the latest hot rumor is that the company may be aiming for a release as early as June 2009.

Microsoft's Live Mesh hasn't officially expanded to include Macs just yet, but the software maker has said that folks in more countries can now take part without having to wait for an invitation.

In a blog posting, Microsoft announced that folks in Canada, India, and Ireland can now join. Microsoft had already opened things up in the United States, United Kingdom, Australia, and New Zealand.

Live Mesh is intended to be a service, over time, that allows cloud-based applications to have desktop components and takes desktop applications into the cloud as well as allowing synchronization among many different devices. For now, though, Live Mesh is primarily a means of synchronizing data across multiple computers.

Several times a link has popped up on Microsoft's site for an early Mac version of the Live Mesh client, although Microsoft has promptly taken down the public links.

Although folks in Canada, India, and Ireland don't need an invite, Microsoft said that there is still a cap for each geography, so those interested might not want to dally too long. The company is expected to broaden testing of Live Mesh ahead of its October Professional Developers Conference, with the service expected to expand to include new features at that point.

The Live Mesh team also posted an interesting blog last week on some of the limits in the current service. For example, individual files can be no larger than 2GB, while the size of all contents in a Live Folder can be up to 10GB. (There's still a 5GB limit for how much data can be stored in the cloud-based Live Desktop.)

Microsoft is launching its Windows 7 blog, but it still doesn't have much to say.

On the plus side, Windows engineering boss Steven Sinofsky did at least put a date to when he would share some more details.

"The Professional Developers Conference (PDC) on October 27 and the Windows Hardware Engineering Conference (WinHEC) the following week both represent the first venues where we will provide in-depth technical information about Windows 7," Sinofsky and Windows Core operating system head Jon Devaan wrote in a posting on Thursday. "This blog will provide context over the next 2+ months with regular posts about the behind the scenes development of the release and continue through the release of the product."

Microsoft had already said that Windows 7 would be on the PDC docket in some manner.

Sinofsky acknowledged that Microsoft continues to say less than many people would like, but repeated his standard line that the company doesn't want to share details until they have reached a certain level of concreteness.

In an interview with CNET News in May, Sinofsky did disclose a few details--namely that it would use the same driver model and basic kernel approach as Windows Vista and that the company wanted the whole thing on the market by January 2010, three years after the mainstream release of Windows Vista. Microsoft also showed in May a glimpse at a new multi-touch interface that will be part of Windows 7.

Sinofsky did suggest that the company wants to be more open at some point as it tries to create a product that serves the needs of a customer base as broad as Windows does.

"We strongly believe that success for Windows 7 includes an open and honest, and two-way, discussion about how we balance all of these interests and deliver software on the scale of Windows," he wrote. "We promise and will deliver such a dialogue with this blog."

One thing that should be pointed out, Microsoft has said that it is engaging much earlier and deeper with computer makers as part of the Windows 7 design process. From what I've heard from PC manufacturers, this has been true so far. "It's like night and day," one PC company executive told me.