Bob Muglia did the keynote on Day 3 and it was all about (as expected) Windows Server System. The highlights are:
- Microsoft Windows Server Cluster Beta 1 – www.microsoft.com/hpc. Today Linux dominates the high performance computing (HPC) market through ad-hoc custom clustering. Windows Server 2003 Cluster Edition hopes to bring a common platform to do this.
- Microsoft is introducing Infocard – a federated identity verification system. You remember .NET Hailstorm?. This time it is supposed to be different, let us wait and see
- Microsoft is introducing XPS (code named Metro) document delivery system as part of Avalon (WinFX WPC). XPS will be the default that applications speak to Printer for Printing, Printer are expected to have native XPS compilers in them around Windows Vista timeframe. XPS is based on Windows Presentation Framework XAML.
- Windows Server Longhorn to be released in 2007. Today first CTP with IIS 7.0 was handed out to all PDC attendees.
- Microsoft is introducing Transaction based file sytem (TxF) for NTFS. It will be an enhancement to NTFS released as part of Longhorn server, which makes every file operation as a transaction. Just like in Database you open Begin Trans, do file copy/move/delete/write/modify and commit trans. If you aren’t using it no overhead; usage also will add very little overhead. I think this is very cool.
- New Event Log model to be introduced in Longhorn server
- IIS 7.0 to be made Modular – modeled like Apache web server. (More details in a separate post). Will also have Windows Activation Service (WAS), ASP.NET Integration, Integrated Diagnostics and Tracing.
- Windows System Center Management, Windows Hypervisor, Virtualization and new enhanced VHD format to be introduced post longhorn server
- Today every piece of MS Server System is available in 64bit. MS Internal IT has seen huge performance benefits on running web servers in 64bit