Microsoft bets big on SilverLight

BANGALORE, INDIA: Microsoft Visual Studio 2008 and .NET Framework 3.5 that was released a few weeks ago, provides advanced development tools, debugging features, database functionality, and innovative features for quickly creating applications across a variety of platforms.

The existing subscribers are allowed to download it. It will be globally launched along with Windows Server 2008 and SQL Server 2008 on Feb 27, 2008.

With Visual Studio 2008, Microsoft wants to deliver developer productivity, tool set for the latest platform and moving forward on our application life cycle tools says S. Somasegar, corporate vice president of the Developer Division at Microsoft Corp.

Microsoft’s India Development Center (MSIDC), located in Hyderabad, played a key role in the development of Visual Studio and Visual Studio Team System. MSIDC has put together a robust team of 1000, which has contributed significantly in developing some of the key features of Visual Studio 2008.

In an exclusive interaction with Dheeksha Rabindra of CyberMedia News, he explained how these new products are a step forward taken by Microsoft to work along with open source community. This is a journey, there is no destination here and every day we are taking a right step forward, says Somasegar. Excerpts:

CMN: How big is the Visual Studio and .NET community in India?

S. SOMASEGAR: It is huge. More interesting is the rate at which we are growing the developer base. I think we have great opportunity to be the number one developer community in the world in coming years. Potential and opportunity is huge.

CMN: Will you be opening the Microsoft codes for developers?

SS: I want to mention three things that we have done in the last one month -– first, we are going to make the source code .NET Framework available for our developer community using our share source license model.

The .NET developer community might be excited about the .NET programming, productivity benefits, but they might not know what is happening internal of the system, especially debugging the application. We are going to give access to developers the source code for the .NET Framework, help them to understand what happens in the Framework in run type and help them to do a better job in debugging their applications. The developer community has received this very well.

We are also making it easy to browse the source code to .NET Framework and be able to quickly jump from one module to another module from within the Visual Studio IE to VS 2008.

Second, earlier a developer could build application targeted only at the Microsoft platform. We wanted to remove this restriction. There are developers who want to build applications targeted at other platforms. We want those developers to take advantage of our tool set. We have removed license restriction in the Visual Studio, and the developer can use the Visual Studio IE and tool set and will be able to target application on any platform.

Third, we have the program called VSIP (Visual Studio Internship Partner) program and our process partners who are using Visual Studio tools platform are building additional functionality like plug in, add ins, controls, complimentary functionality etc. We want to provide source code to Visual Studio to our premium partners.

There are lots of things we are doing to open ourselves to community at large.

CMN: With whom are you working for the development of semantic standards? You have earlier worked with C-DAC language computing.

SS: We have the EGMA standard community. They specialize in setting language standards. We are huge participants in the EGMA standard body. We are believer of EGMA community.

Outside, there are two things that we want to be compliant with standard and want to be in thought leadership position and help in setting the agenda for how the standard should evolve.

We have developer platform organization, who work with partner community and they have been working with C-DAC.

CMN: Is SilverLight a Flash and Java killer?

SS: That is what I would like to say. SilverLight is cross platform cross program run type that enables you to provide interactive experiences and rich Internet applications. We want developers to reuse their experience, expertise and skills into new programming environment having to learn a whole new set of things.

With SilverLight 2.0, which is the next version of SilverLight, we want to bring .NET Programming to SilverLight. If you are a C# developer, VB developer, Ruby developer or any kind of developer should be able to use their language skills and programming knowledge to be able to build on the application. This is going to be a huge advantage for our developer community to be able to write applications and deliver them in a productive easy way over the Web.

CMN: How has the response been to SilverLight by the developer community?

SS: I think the response been is phenomenal. For us to get right level of traction for SilverLight, we really need to work with content providers and ensure content delivery for SilverLight. The more interesting content we can deliver, more excitement will be among the consumers to be able to use SilverLight. Developer and content partner perspective the response has been phenomenal.

CMN: Is Microsoft betting big on SilverLight in India especially with Steve Ballmer coming down for the launch?

SS: Yes, we are betting big on SilverLight in India. Steve is a big believer of SilverLight and Web developers. The third annual Web Developer conference will be held on early March next year and Steve will be addressing the conference.

CMN: Is SilverLight a change from proprietary to open source?

SS: I want to differentiate here. SilverLight is a cross platform run program type and not open source run type. Working with partners we want make sure that SilverLight runs on variety of platforms, devices and variety of browsers. We want to be open from that perspective.

CMN: Post Novell pact, how is the collaboration going on with the open source community?

SS: We worked with Novell to enable SilverLight to work on Linux, which I think is a huge step forward in terms of engaging with open source community. We believe in intra-proprietary, we believe in the community and we want to work as a community.

We want to work with open source community and enable them to be successful. In that perspective we are open to work with company like Novell and open to say that we do want SilverLight to work on Linux. This is a huge step forward.

We also say that this is a journey, there is no destination here and every day we are taking a right step forward.

CMN: Do you have any specific strategies to tap open source community?

SS: We want the open source community to be able to build applications that run on the SilverLight run type or .NET Framework. We want to enable the community to be successful in doing that. So when source code are made available to developers, whether they are part of open source or enterprise, it is all about saying that building some applications that you want to deliver and take a bet on our platform. We want to give all the tools and source code, applications you need access to so you can be successful and effective.