Unpacking the MS Technology Stack

As a technologist within Microsoft, I’m always fascinated by the constant tension between our need to produce glossy easy-to-use consumer-oriented products, that sell in droves; and the need to articulate the increasingly complex technologies that underpin these products. In fact, despite numerous beta and technology preview programmes, the increasing complexity and sheer pace of innovation in our technology stack is making the latter an ever more challenging task.

If you’re a teacher, just keeping on top of the technology wave isn’t enough. How do you précis the new technology into taught material? How do you decide which technologies will make good teaching exemplars? How do you learn what will work and what won’t?

That’s where this newsletter comes in. Over the next few months, we’ll be digging down into our existing technology platform, and also looking ahead to our next generation of products. To help put all of this into context, we’ll also be publishing articles from academics whose teaching currently utilises our technology – discussing the why and of their implementation, and also thoughts on what was good and perhaps what wasn’t so good.

In addition we’ll be publishing a relevant technical article, news and general articles, book reviews, activities and resources for your students, highlighting forthcoming events and giving advance notice of funding and other development opportunities from Microsoft and its Partners.

So, what does the technology plan look like and what should you look out for now and in future articles? We should really start with WinFX– the programming framework underpinning Windows Vista, and also available for existing versions of windows. (http://www.microsoft.com/windowsvista/developers.mspx). WinFX comprises three new technologies – Windows Presentation Foundation - unifies how Windows creates, displays, and manipulates documents, media, and user interface (UI), enabling developers and designers to create visually stunning, differentiated user experiences. Windows Communication Foundation – builds on the integrated web service capabilities of .NET, a framework for developing secure, reliable, and interoperable applications Windows Workflow Foundation – provides mechanisms for simple development of workflow-driven applications.

We’ll also be looking not only at the current releases of C# and VB.NET, but the new language features recently announced at the Microsoft Professional Developers Conference (PDC). These include query enhancements (LINQ link), enhanced XML handling capabilities (PDC ref for XML literals) and Expression Trees. Expect our existing web platform to get a hefty mention – ASP.NET offers an excellent introduction to enterprise-scale web development for students, and with project Atlas (ref) students can really start to push the boundaries of contemporary web applications. Of course, we won’t miss out on mobile device development either – with the release of Windows Mobile 5 and the .NET Compact Framework 2.0, developing for handheld devices and mobile phones has never been an easier or more unified process, and provides and ideal low-barrier mechanism for introducing this increasingly pervasive technology.

Finally, we’ll want to look at the source-code released from Microsoft under the Shared Source Licensing scheme (ref), which contains a raft of code, from Bluetooth radio stack APIs to a complete implementation of the .NET framework and SDK. Which by no coincidence whatsoever, is the topic of our first Practical Teaching article, from David Grey of Hull University.