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.NET Servers and the Future of .NET

The designers of the .NET Framework put much thought into how distributed computing should work. It seems that .NET is the next killer app, but to make the .NET Framework a widespread success, actual servers must be built using the .NET Framework. Currently, there are no true .NET servers. There are servers that take advantage of the common language runtime and its managed execution environment, but most servers from Microsoft today still run under COM and unmanaged code.

Commerce Server 2002 is positioned as a .NET server for e-commerce, and applications you design with it can be completely written using Visual Basic .NET or C#, but the underlying infrastructure of Commerce Server is still based on COM. Because rewriting server applications is a truly monumental task, the move to completely .NET servers could take several years. Along the way, there'll be servers such as Commerce Server 2002 that are half managed code and half unmanaged code. From a developer's viewpoint that's fine, because you don't want to write ASP and Visual Basic 6 code for server products while the rest of your distributed application development is in a .NET language.

Currently, Microsoft seems to be positioning server products as .NET Enterprise Servers if they can integrate XML Web services into their existing infrastructure. For example, SQL Server 2000 certainly isn't written in managed code, but there are add-ons to SQL Server 2000 that enable you to expose stored procedures as XML Web services. The SQL Server Notification Service is a .NET add-on that allows notification to .NET applications if certain events trigger in SQL. BizTalk server's purpose in life is the orchestration and automation of complex business processes, and it's positioned as a .NET server because of its capability to consume XML Web services. The following Microsoft server products are considered .NET Enterprise Servers because of their capability to at least interact with a distributed environment such as the Internet and have some relationship with the .NET Framework concepts:

• Internet Security and Acceleration Server




• Application Center 2000




• Commerce Server 2000 and Commerce Server 2002




• BizTalk Server 2000 and BizTalk Server 2002




• SQL Server 2000




• Exchange Server 2000




• Host Integration Server 2000

In my opinion, the fact that a .NET server is truly running under the common language runtime is not a deal breaker. For .NET to get to the next step, it must run on other operating systems, not just the Windows family of desktop and server operating systems. Currently, the Mono project is a grass-roots move to port the .NET Framework class library to the Linux operating system. That means the code you're writing now for Windows will also eventually run under Linux and, hopefully, Unix as well. You can learn more about the Mono project and where it currently is in the development process at http://www.go-mono.org. It would be a huge step forward if .NET were ported to the Macintosh operating system also. Although the Mac is still a small percentage of the overall market in desktop PCs, its incompatibility with Windows creates headaches for application developers. There needs to be consistency across platforms eventually.

Moving into the future with .NET, the sky seems to be the limit. This isn't necessarily because Microsoft is going to think of some great new thing to add to the .NET Framework, even though it most likely will, but it has to do with computing in general and the general infrastructure of our daily lives. As every household and business installs high-speed data access, and as computers become faster and cheaper, the applications you write will have a greater influence on how people look at what computer programs can do. You aren't bound to single servers anymore. Writing truly distributed and scalable applications is very easy because of the groundwork laid out by the .NET Framework. You can begin to look at the code you write not as blocks of modules running on a Windows 2000 Server, but as distributed objects that you can reuse in multiple applications across an enterprise simply by plugging them into an XML Web service. The future of .NET is the concept of a true distributed environment.