.NET Editor-in-Chief Derek Ferguson sat down to talk with Microsoft's S. "Soma" Somasegar in Chicago recently. In this exclusive interview, Somasegar talks about Microsoft's new Partner program; the future of the .NET platform, in both the short and long term; and how Microsoft has learned from the open source community.

.NETDJ: Tell me about your role at Microsoft.
SS: I am currently corporate vice president for the Developer Division. I've been in this role since the beginning of the year - two or three months.

.NETDJ: What did you do before your new position?
SS: I joined Microsoft on January 23, 1989 - I will always remember that date. I've been with the company for 15 years; I spent those 15 years in operating systems. I started off in the OS/2 group, which we did with IBM. About a year after I joined, we had hired about a dozen people from DEC, and they had done enough thinking and work that we thought we should go ahead and build a completely new operating system. So I joined the NT group in 1990, stayed with them all the way through the release of Windows Server 2003, and moved over at the beginning of this year to run the Developer Division.

.NETDJ: What inspired your move?
SS: Three things! To begin with, if you look at our developer constituency over the 28 years of our company's history - they are the lifeblood of our existence, the most important segment because we are basically a platform company, and platforms are successful only if you have developers willing to bet on your platform. We thought developers were the most important right from day one. Our division is all about winning the hearts and minds of developers. Being a software company, targeting the most important segment, I figured "How much more important a job in the organization could I get?"

The second thing was the people. The developer division has an amazing group of talented people - I can rattle off the names of many, many people, and it is a major draw for me to work with so many high-performance people.

The third thing is - if you think about the .NET platform and Visual Studio .NET - just imagine how many other "impactful" things people all over the world must be using these tools to build. So, massive impact, brilliant people, and serving our most important customer segment are the three things that inspired my move.

.NETDJ: How do you fit into Microsoft's reporting structure?
SS: Do you know how the company is organized? A couple of years ago Steve Ballmer decided to organize the company as seven businesses or P&Ls. The Server and Tools P&L contains the Developer Division, so I report to Eric Rudder, who runs the P&L.

.NETDJ: What do you do as corporate vice president for the Developer Division?
SS: The Developer Division is focused on two things. One is our tools, the Visual Studio family of products, and the other is the .NET platform technologies such as the .NET Framework, ASP.NET (which we now call the Web Tools and Platform), Indigo, and the .NET Compact Framework. In a nutshell, those are the two areas we focus on.

The final thing I do is oversee our India Development Center, which we've had for five or six years now. It is part of me - I was involved in setting it up in the first place. We produce a bunch of technologies for all of the product groups from our India Development Center.

.NETDJ: So what is Microsoft's stance on global outsourcing?
SS: Beyond this, there are a couple of things to consider. First, Microsoft is a global company, and if you look at our customers, our customers are global customers. We need to understand our customers as well as our partners. We have offices in about 78 different countries. We have 54,000 employees - this year we will hire 3,000+ employees. The majority of our employees (36,000+) are based in the U.S. and the bulk of the growth will also be in the U.S. Some of it will be based on where we get traction, where we can find talent, and where we need to build relationships.

Second, developers are a very valuable asset, and Microsoft is all about building software. For us to be able to understand our customers, we need a diverse set of employees.

Finally, we will give it a lot of thought before deciding to do parts of our business elsewhere. The two things that matter most to us are quality and customer satisfaction. Nothing we do must interfere with quality or customer satisfaction. The software developers of the world are a very valuable asset. On the one hand, we can say "Hey, one of Visual Studio's key goals is to improve developer productivity" - meaning fewer lines of code to do the same thing. Nonetheless, the kinds of apps that people are building - well, their complexity is increasing. There is a need for more and more developers in the world. Guess what, not all developers are in any one part of the world. As time progresses, you will see workloads shifting from place to place. Each year the world gets smaller. So, in this global economy you are going to see the developers of the world coming together to build great software to solve great problems.

For the Developer Division, we are building VJ# - which is a part of Visual Studio - out of our Development Center in India.

.NETDJ: As the new corporate VP of Microsoft's Developer Division, can you explain why Microsoft Partners will be awarded only 2 points per MCSD or MCAD under the new Partner program? Don't you think that awarding so few points will be a disincentive for employers to get their employees certified?
SS: We still strongly believe in certification, and training, too. If you look at the program - I'm speaking from recollection - training and certification is still a very strong component toward getting an organization certified. You have MCSD, MCAD, etc. All we are saying is that if you get an employee certified, you'll get 2 points. So why not get 20 employees certified to get 40 points? So, in some sense, you could say that we are actually adding value to certification, thereby encouraging platform adoption.

.NETDJ: And how happy are you with the current rate of .NET adoption? Do you think the economic downtown has affected it at all?
SS: I'm excited and happy about .NET adoption thus far. Just to give you some numbers, there are 80,000,000 or more desktops that now have the .NET Framework installed; a lot of the OEMs install it, and there have been 50,000,000 downloads from Windows Update.

Of the Fortune 100, I think about 64 of them have major applications built on .NET running in production environments today.

We've distributed 2.5 million copies of Visual Studio .NET and we have this VSIP program for Visual Studio Partners. We have about 185 Premier VSIP partners and 13,000 affiliate partners. We have over 350 add-in modules and programs that these partners have built on top of Visual Studio .NET.

We feel pretty good about the ecosystem and the progress we have made toward adoption. Over the past three or four years we have had a bad economy, yet we continued to progress in spite of that.

.NETDJ: Many commercial developers blame some of the IT sector's bad times on open source software. What do you think of open source? Is it a threat to commercial developers? How can we fight back?
SS: When I think about open source, I think about it as a software development methodology. I wouldn't necessarily call it a threat to commercial software, because I don't think it is. To me, open source is about sharing source code, and if you look at what we've done, we've been doing our own sharing of source code - MFC libraries, the ASP.NET Starter Kits, etc. Our position is that if you want to have access to our source code so you can understand and learn, then we are excited about it.

What is exciting to me about open source is that there are some great practices we should look at. For example, they have created a very strong and vibrant community. Over the past few years, we have stepped up our community involvement because we think that is an excellent part of the equation. We want to learn from open source.

On the other hand, there is a small set of people who think that innovation is something that you shouldn't charge for; they don't believe in intellectual property. We believe in IP. We think that the anti-IP people are a small but vocal element within the open source community.

I'll tell you one other thing that we just announced. We now have - and the Developer Division is taking the lead here - a Community Technology Preview program. The idea is that if we're building a product and releasing it internally for testing, why shouldn't we share it with our customers? We dropped the first tech preview of Visual Studio 2005 yesterday and now anyone who has an MSDN Universal Subscription can go and download it. We want to do this periodically throughout our development cycles.

The thing to remember is that since we are going to be doing these as simple snapshots of our code at given points in time, their quality might not be as good as our standardized betas.

.NETDJ: As we watch .NET evolve over the course of these tech previews and releases, how will .NET languages evolve?
SS: There are a couple of things happening here. We are currently continuing to innovate in languages and continuing to add more features to make it easy for people to do what they would like. For example, in the .NET Framework 2.0, we will have generics support. Our generics support is done in such a way that you get the performance benefits at runtime.

.NETDJ: Isn't letting Java 1.5 go to market first with things like generics support dangerous, though? Is it true that Visual Studio 2005 was delayed to stay in sync with SQL Server 2005?
SS: We are not worried about Java 1.5. According to what I've read about the generics support in Java, it is only generics support at design time. This means that you can get it when you're writing your code, but at runtime the benefits don't seem to be there. There is no performance gain from generics in Java 1.5 like you will see in .NET.

Also, if you look at attributes support, they are just catching up to what we have already had for several years.

As far as the nature of the delay is concerned, do you know why we joined Visual Studio 2005 and SQL Server 2005 together? We have a term we use internally - integrated innovation. This means that you want to be able to create products where the whole is greater than the sum of the individual parts. In SQL Server 2005 you will be able to create stored procedures in managed code. This is the main reason that we said these two products are joined at the hip. After we made that decision, some of the managed user interface stuff in SQL Server also started to use the Visual Studio shell.

.NETDJ: What other needs do you currently see for additional languages? I've heard rumblings about something called X#, for example.
SS: We don't use the name X# anymore; now we call it Xen. We are asking how can you handle XML - from within whatever language you choose - more effectively? In fact, how can you handle data in a more effective manner? Are there any additional language constructs we can add? Anders Hejlsberg is now thinking about this and working with the Xen guys on how to do this. This will happen in a post-.NET Framework 2.0 timeframe.

.NETDJ: Speaking of Anders Hejlsberg, who do you feel are the two or three biggest icons of .NET development?
SS: Anders Hejlsberg, a Distinguished Engineer, is definitely an icon both within and outside the company. The other super-smart guy is Brad Lovering; he is another Distinguished Engineer in our division - and the chief architect for Indigo. Brad was in Visual Basic for a long time before moving to Indigo three or four years ago. Don Box, who is another major icon, works for him.

On the ASP.NET side, Scott Guthrie and Mark Anders are extremely important. And, finally, there's Chris Anderson, who does a lot with Avalon.

.NETDJ: What are some other changes that will be coming along as the .NET platform progresses?
SS: Another thing we are doing - in some ways redoing - is our Managed Extensions for C++, including managed memory support, which a lot of people have been asking for. If you have legacy C++ code but want to take advantage of managed features, this is a good way to go.

Another thing we are thinking about is asynchronous communication. What can we add to languages to make this easier? Asynchrony is a vital part of service-oriented architecture (SOA), so this is a problem to which we are giving a lot of thought!

Finally, in the Longhorn timeframe, developers should think about XAML as a declarative language. It takes the best parts of a procedural language and the best parts of a declarative language and merges the two together to help create rich Windows applications. This will come out in the Longhorn timeframe.

.NETDJ: When will developers get their next build of Longhorn to play with?
SS: For now we're focused on making sure the Visual Studio 2005 wave of products is rock-solid. We are also getting Longhorn out to developers early so they can familiarize themselves with the tools and provide feedback. Other than that, we're not talking about specific ship dates.

.NETDJ: One of the bits of Longhorn that I have the hardest time coming to grips with is Indigo. Why should developers care about Indigo?
SS: As I mentioned earlier, the world is becoming a smaller place. You're going to see systems talking to each other more and more. You're going to see true distributed applications become the norm as opposed to the exception. To be able to develop true distributed applications without knowing in advance what systems are going to be running together is a difficult challenge.

In this world, where people have choices, you want something that can cut across systems and really be able to communicate in a reliable, secure, transacted way. Indigo is a collection of interfaces that lets you write Web services in a seamless, interoperable manner.

Today, for example, we have MSMQ; we have COM+; and we also have a variety of other technologies. What we have today is alphabet soup.

Take MSMQ, for example. If you want to interoperate with MQ you need to understand both sides. If you want to work with COM+, you need to understand that. It is an eclectic collection, and interoperability for each of these is at a different level; some of them work better than others.

Indigo will abstract it all and provide a set of interfaces that developers can write to that will easily interoperate for them. You want to be able to use industry-standard XML to get from point A to point B. Things will get cleaner, more secure, and more reliable with Indigo.

.NETDJ: What flavors of OS (client, server, mobile, etc.) will be encompassed by Longhorn?
SS: When you think about Longhorn, think about it as a codename for a family of products. Longhorn is internally associated with a product, as well as a wave of products. The first instantiation of Longhorn will be the Windows client (the desktop OS). After that, we'll see.

.NETDJ: When is the RTM for Longhorn currently expected?
SS: The most important milestone is Longhorn Beta 1, because I expect to have a certain amount done at that point, and then we can get feedback and know if we are on track. The team is in a mindset now to say that they feel very good about the features and scenarios for that beta, and it is time to get it done.

.NETDJ: Once Longhorn ships, how quickly do you expect ISVs to begin utilizing WinFS? Don't you think such a radical paradigm shift will take time to catch on?
SS: There are two things to think about here. We've talked about unified storage for a long time. It is a big bet, but we are so excited about the bet that we think that the more ISVs see it, the more excited they will get, too. We got very positive feedback from ISVs coming out of the PDC that indicated they really felt they would be taking advantage of it.

If you go back to Windows 95 and earlier Win16 programming, OLE was sort of a technology that caught the world on fire because the ability to have applications talk to each other was huge. That was a big shift at the time - and WinFS is even bigger! We feel really good about this, and our early indicators point toward widespread adoption.

And, of course, all of our own applications - Office, for example, will start leveraging it right away, also.

.NETDJ: Why should business developers care about Avalon? Aren't its fancy graphical features mainly for games and multimedia?
SS: At first blush, it looks like it is a rich presentation system that is going to do cool UIs, but does anyone in the business world care? Think back to 1995 and how much has happened over the past 10 years. The UI for the average business application hasn't changed much. However, we think of Avalon as a rich presentation system that will make it easier for anyone to use the PC.

Go to any local business and you've got situations where people open up one application, then they open up another application - and when the first application's window gets hidden, they wonder why. The number of support calls we get about just this one issue is amazing! Of course, sophisticated users don't worry about this.

Now think about how different the situation would be if you had transparent windows, as with Avalon. We get excited because we think it will be easier for people to understand.

We are also excited about alerts and context-sensitive scrollbars. If you think about Avalon as just a UI piece, it is hard for business developers to get excited. So think about it as something that makes it easier to code easy-to-use applications of all kinds.

.NETDJ: Are there any important technologies that I have neglected to mention?
SS: Windows XP Service Pack 2. We just shipped the first release candidate last week. The main theme is security. We've done a variety of things, and if you go to Microsoft.com you can read all about it. I would encourage developers to pick this up today to see what it means to develop an application that can handle strong security requirements!

.NETDJ: I've gotten a lot of e-mail from Microsoft encouraging me to try XP SP2, but I'm a little concerned about the stability of a service pack release candidate! And what happens when you finally ship the real SP2, then? Can I uninstall the release candidate?
SS: Uninstall of XP SP2 works well. Let's say you load SP2 RC1 - you always have the fall-back position of uninstalling. And RC2 definitely won't make your machine any less secure - the amount of effort that has gone in has been an order of magnitude higher than any previous service pack release.

There's always this kind of interesting tension between security and compatibility, so we want all of our applications and users to test this out. In today's world, security is the highest priority, so we've had to make changes that might break some existing applications. However, we don't want to tell our customers to go away once they are secure, even if they have applications breaking. We want to get feedback early so we can know what the issues are and resolve them, and then everyone wins!

.NETDJ: Where would you like to see .NET 10 years from now?
SS: In some sense, I think about .NET as a way of life in the cyber world. That's where I want .NET to be - I don't want people to even have to think about it. There are two elements: managed code and Web services. I think they are going to be so prevalent that people will use them without even thinking about it. We are making a huge bet on managed code in Longhorn: the shell will be managed code and the WinFX API (Avalon, Indigo, and WinFS) will all be managed code. So, we practice what we preach.

.NETDJ: How can developers start getting ready for Visual Studio 2005 and SQL Server 2005 today?
SS: The core of .NET is managed code and Web services. People should be figuring out how to move their investments into the managed world. If you are a developer and you want to get information, come to MSDN online and see all of the information we have there. If you are a Universal Subscriber, then you get access to all of the bits, too, so you can start writing applications with .NET 2.0 today!

.NETDJ: Why change the name of Visual Studio .NET to Visual Studio 2005? Is .NET going away?
SS: We changed the name in response to customer and partner feedback to provide clarity around our .NET strategy and programs. Specifically, we are moving toward a branding approach where ".NET Connected" is the way we communicate our products (and our partners' products) that enable customers to easily and consistently connect disparate information, systems, and devices to meet their people and business needs regardless of the underlying platform or programming languages.

Visual Studio 2005 represents a major step forward in our effort to provide the most connected, productive, secure, and dependable infrastructure with the best economic value for our customers. Visual Studio 2005 will set the industry bar for productive Web service development and performance. Microsoft remains committed to Visual Studio customers, to the .NET brand and to the concept of .NET-connected applications.

About S. "Soma" Somasegar
S. "Soma" Somasegar is corporate vice president of Microsoft's Developer Division, which is primarily responsible for all the developer-related-languages, tools, and platforms within Microsoft, including Visual Studio, the Web Platform and Tools, the .NET Framework, the Common Language Runtime, and other .NET developer platform technologies. In addition, he oversees the India Development Center (IDC) in Hyderabad, India.