Stultifying standards

Attending last month's Microsoft Technical Education Conference (Tech-Ed) I met some of the finest software development gurus of our age. They reminded me, somewhat, of the late Lord Thomson of Fleet. Thomson, the man whose lifetime ambition it was to own The Times, was said to have amused himself by sitting by his home swimming pool reading double-entry bookkeeping ledgers.

The top systems developers of our age also seem equally adept at keeping the names of a few thousand abstruse technical terms at the top of their heads and know how to link this one to that without invoking a third, which when combined with a fourth would generate a conflict that would render the fifth and sixth inoperative?thus causing an illegal data access vulnerability.

Is this really what programming has come to? Most of what occupied my own studies at Tech-Ed was the fast-evolving mobile device market and the ways to support it. It was also apparent that the future, as far as Microsoft is concerned, is SQL and that NTFS and the JET database engine that evolved with it will be replaced by SQL everywhere..

The reasoning behind this is that it makes it easier to move data around. Instead of having to analyse data and write specific applications to transfer its structures intact, each application merely has to save data in SQL file format. The SQL replication engine then leaps into action and puts it everywhere else..

This situation may be a few years off, but already Microsoft has provided a handheld version of SQL for CE devices and people are using it for synchronisation of data from the network to Pocket PC. And it's looking like the key step in this smoothly integrated world of data will be Microsoft?s .Net initiative..

As far as Microsoft is concerned, though, its .Net plan isn't just under way, it's steamrollering all those before it. I first saw this as being little more than Redmond?s answer to Java. It has gradually dawned on me that it's more of a 'solution to everything' -- the ability to write programs that will execute, relatively efficiently, on a huge variety of devices. .

There is, I'm sure, no way of making the whole world make music together, except by complex orchestration. And the rules of complex orchestration can't be ignored in any detail. I understand the necessity, but where's the excitement?

Lord Thomson, of course, said there was more excitement to be found in the records of a long-lost enterprise than in any flowery romantic novel. You just had to be able to understand it. Today, of course, you'd just graph the figures with Excel and a 3D image of the corporation's demise would appear. .

But this is only made possible by the fact that all the pieces necessary to make the picture are now known. The jigsaw puzzle that was so fascinating to the pioneers of network computing is no longer a puzzle. If you want to see the picture, you just need to put the pieces down on their numbered slots. Invoke DCPROMO/ADV and update the domain catalogue, replicate the dependencies in SYSVOL, check for this object, instantiate that version of the schema. Of course, the complexity of it all is beyond easy comprehension and beyond being safely assembled either. .

I think it struck me just how global is the vision of software architects these days when I started investigating voice-over-IP using session initialisation protocol...

Today, almost no PC device uses SIP as a way of setting up a voice conversation over the Internet. Phones can digitise voice, but it then gets packetised in proprietary ways and transmitted in proprietary protocols. The knowledge of how it gets where it is going is in the hands of a few people. With SIP, control can move to the owners of the data -- the voice stream -- and it can go 'free' over the Internet..

But although no phone built yet seems to have the ability to switch seamlessly from GSM to Wi-Fi, the tools to enable roaming from Bluetooth to DECT for software already exist -- the .Net Compact Framework has them in and is working.How long before these technical events are indistinguishable from a chartered accountants' convention, just with different legal names for the components? It's not that bad yet, but can we avoid it?

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