Thursday General Session

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Thursday’s general session was put on by Bob Muglia from Microsoft. He presented the future for the Windows Server Platform over the next three years.

First, coming this year will be a Windows 2003 R2 Release. This update to Windows 2003 will contain a set of new features such as:

  • Branch Office support (not too clear on this)
  • Replication
  • Will include .Net Framework 2.0
  • Active Directory will have Federation Services (The ability to handle tokens provided by third party organizations to authenticate users/services from those third parties to your resources)
  • Will have ADAM in the box.
  • Provide more Unix interoperability.
  • MMC 3.0 (including the ability to have managed code snap-ins)
  • WS Management tools

They also demonstrated a graphical tool to layout physical deployment of components, then with a simple click of the button (heh), a package is created and can be deployed by enterprise deployment like SMS or by hand.

They also showed lots of innovations around better error tracking and collection of error data.

Sometime in 2006 they will ship the Windows 2003 Compute Cluster Solution, which is distributed processing across machines for research and scientific processing of massive amounts of data. Think SETI @ Home and distributed computing. They showed a demo of the cluster solution by submitting work to be done on the cluster. While the node (a member of the cluster) was performing some work they pulled the network cable. The monitoring tool picked up the server was no longer available and put the job it had assigned it back into the queue to be processed. You can check out a Beta of this if you have the hardware.

The new command line tool, code named “Monad” will be available next year. This is an object based command line to improve the ability to write administrative scripts. The command line was built on top of .Net. They are in the process of switching all current MMC tools to managed code, and thus will be available for your own scripts and in the Monad command environment.

Also in 2006 they will release WinFx for the server platform (I’m assuming in the Vista timeframe). After this they will be basing all their server messaging and workflows on the underpinnings of WCF and WWF.

While Vista will ship in 2006, the server version will ship in 2007. The new server will have a Transactional File System (TxF), feature a new Event Log and quite a bit more. The server platform will be more “modular” so that you only install what you need to limit the surface area for attack and reduce overhead. There is a “Server Core” that is the OS at it’s base level, but then you can add the “Server Core Plus” which provides more capabilities and services. The Server Core is a NON-GUI based environment! All command line! Then, with the Core Plus you can get the shell environment and MMC stuff if you want. On top of the Core Plus you can then install your server products.

IIS7 was provided for the first look on the “Goods” DVD for people who came to PDC. They provided a little insight into what is coming and I have to say it’s pretty promising. First of all, like the server itself, IIS will become more modular. You pick and choose what items you want the service to provide. Under the hood in IIS6 everything is in one big DLL. In IIS7 things are spread out across multiple assemblies.

BIG NEWS: The IIS Metabase is dead. All configuration is moved to config files. More specifically, the web.config for your projects. This makes deployment of web sites MUCH nicer in that when you go to deploy you don’t have to spend Operations time configuring IIS, you just include the config file with the No-touch deployment of the rest of the site!

In the demonstration of the configuration I saw them remove services that didn’t need to be present for a static HTML site (such as the authentication service, etc.) then hit the site to show it still worked (all without restarting IIS!). He even removed all the services and showed that nothing was returned or served up, and then replaced the services and showed the site came back (also without restarting IIS). Pretty slick.

Oh, the best part? Since each one of the services is now a component you can easily replace ANY of the services with your own. The example he gave was to replace the directory listing service (the service that is invoked when you just browse to a directory that has directory browsing turned on) with his own that found images and displayed a nice thumbnail viewer. Swapped it out on the fly. Very nice.

That’s about it for the general session, and was the start of a long day.