iMav
The Devil's Advocate
Past projects from Microsoft's Live Labs group have been the kinds of things that might catch the attention of PC users, such as the Photosynth photo browsing program. The latest Live Labs project is aimed squarely at Web developers. It's a set of Web development tools called Volta. The company is releasing it in experimental form this morning.
The tools are an extension of the company's .NET development system. The project reflects Microsoft's "software plus services" philosophy of running programs on a PC or device in conjunction with a remote server -- across multiple "tiers," as the practice is known. With that basic introduction, here's the very technical description from the Volta site.
Whether that will translate into success for the Volta project remains to be seen. DeMichillie said it seems to be an attempt by the company to reclaim the attention of software and Web developers at a time when the center of gravity has shifted to things like Apache, Linux, Perl and PHP.
Microsoft says it doesn't yet know where Volta is headed, from a product perspective. It's not clear whether it will ultimately become a product, contribute to one, or remain just an experiment.
Source
The tools are an extension of the company's .NET development system. The project reflects Microsoft's "software plus services" philosophy of running programs on a PC or device in conjunction with a remote server -- across multiple "tiers," as the practice is known. With that basic introduction, here's the very technical description from the Volta site.
"Volta is an experimental developer toolset that allows developers to build standards-conformant, multi-tier web applications using established .NET languages, libraries and development tools. Via declarative tier-splitting, developers architect their applications as a single-tier application, then make decisions about moving logic to other tiers late in the development process- letting the complier manage creating boilerplate code such as communication between tiers. The programmer can still debug and test the application, much as if it were still on the client-tier, because Volta's tier-splitting is deeply integrated with Visual Studio 2008 and the .NET Framework 3.5. In summary, Volta extends the .NET platform to distributed software+services applications, by using existing and familiar libraries, languages, tools, and techniques."
Translation: "From a developers' perspective, it's the kind of stuff that will make the propeller on your beanie spin," said Greg DeMichillie, an analyst for independent research firm Directions on Microsoft. Whether that will translate into success for the Volta project remains to be seen. DeMichillie said it seems to be an attempt by the company to reclaim the attention of software and Web developers at a time when the center of gravity has shifted to things like Apache, Linux, Perl and PHP.
Microsoft says it doesn't yet know where Volta is headed, from a product perspective. It's not clear whether it will ultimately become a product, contribute to one, or remain just an experiment.
Source
