Editor's Note: The author of the "Street Fighting Comes to Web Services" article contacted all of the companies mentioned in this article. The following Microsoft response was received after our copy deadline. It is included below in its entirety.

What is .NET?

Microsoft is creating an advanced new generation of software that melds computing and communications in a revolutionary new way, offering every developer the tools they need to transform the Web and every other aspect of the computing experience. We call this initiative Microsoft® .NET, and for the first time it enables developers, businesses, and consumers to harness technology on their terms. Microsoft .NET will allow the creation of truly distributed Web services that will integrate and collaborate with a range of complementary services to serve customers in ways that today's dot-coms can only dream of. Microsoft .NET will drive the Next Generation Internet. It really will make information available any time, any place, and on any device.

The fundamental idea behind Microsoft .NET is that the focus is shifting from individual Web sites or devices connected to the Internet to constellations of computers, devices, and services that work together to deliver broader, richer solutions. People will have control over how, when, and what information is delivered to them. Computers, devices, and services will be able to collaborate with each other to provide rich services, instead of being isolated islands where the user provides the only integration. Businesses will be able to offer their products and services in a way that lets customers seamlessly embed them in their own electronic fabric. It is a vision that extends the personal empowerment first offered by the PC in the 1980s. Microsoft .NET will help drive a transformation in the Internet that will see HTML-based presentation augmented by programmable XML-based information. XML is a widely-supported industry standard defined by the World Wide Web Consortium (W3C), the same organization that created the standards for the Web browser. It was developed with extensive input from Microsoft, but is not a proprietary Microsoft technology. XML provides a means of separating actual data from the presentational view of that data. It is a key to the Next Generation Internet, offering a way to unlock information so that it can be organized, programmed, and edited; a way to distribute data in more useful ways to a variety of digital devices; and allowing Web sites to collaborate and provide a constellation of Web Services that will be able to interact with each another.

Microsoft .NET is comprised of the following:

• Microsoft .NET platform: The .NET Framework includes .NET infrastructure and tools to build and operate a new generation of services; .NET user experience to enable rich clients; .NET building block services, a new generation of highly distributed mega-services; and .NET device software to enable a new breed of smart Internet devices.
• Microsoft .NET products and services: Includes Windows.NET, the .NET Enterprise servers and a core integrated set of building block services; .NET My Services; MSN .NET; personal subscription services; Office.NET; Visual Studio® .NET; and bCentral? for .NET.
• Third-party .NET services: A vast range of partners and developers will have the opportunity to produce corporate and vertical services built on the .NET platform.

For consumers, that means the simplicity of integrated services; unified browsing, editing, and authoring; access to all your files, work, and media online and off; a holistic experience across devices; personalization everywhere; and zero management. It means, for example, that any change to your information - whether input via your PC or handheld or smart credit card - will instantly and automatically be available everywhere that information is needed.

For knowledge workers and businesses, it means unified browsing, editing, and authoring; rich coordinated communication; a seamless mobile experience; and powerful information-management and e-commerce tools that will transparently move between internal and Internet-based services, and support a new era of dynamic trading relationships.

For independent software developers, it means the opportunity to create advanced new services for the Internet Age - services that are able to automatically access and leverage information either locally or remotely, working with any device or language, without having to rewrite code for each environment. Everything on the Internet becomes a potential building block for this new generation of services, while every application can be exposed as a service on the Internet.

The Microsoft .NET vision means empowerment for consumers, businesses, software developers and the entire industry. It means unleashing the full potential of the Internet. And it means the Web the way you want it. www.microsoft.com/business/whitepapers/net/net.asp

1. What's the business case for a Web services developer choosing .NET?

.NET extends the ideas of both the Internet and operating systems by making the Internet itself the basis of a new operating system via Web services. It provides the easiest and most extensive Web services platform. .NET was designed from day one as the platform for distributed computing. Web services are built in rather than bolted on. Ultimately, this will allow developers to create programs that transcend machine, platform, and device boundaries. Businesses will thus benefit from radically increased efficiency and productivity as .NET brings employees, customers, data, and business applications into a coherent and intelligently interactive place. In short, .NET promises a world of business without boundaries.

.NET offers the richest Web services support and hence the widest level of interoperability thus providing developers and businesses with the most opportunity to leverage their investments. .NET was built as a platform for Web services and distributed computing. It has the best tools and support for Web services and is therefore the best choice for Web service developers.

2. Is there in fact a choice that needs to be made between J2EE and .NET?

Yes and no. The clear choice is to use .NET as the platform for application development and legacy application integration. Does that mean that legacy J2EE applications need to be rewritten? While many of our customers have chosen to do so for performance and cost reasons, this is not a requirement and developers using .NET can easily integrate and leverage these legacy systems by utilizing the Web services capabilities of .NET. It thus provides a platform for moving forward and for leveraging existing investments. .NET has a proven track record of reducing costs, reducing time to market, increasing productivity and increasing flexibility.

3. Is .NET an open platform?

Yes. .NET is an open platform based on open standards. Microsoft has committed to taking the core protocols of .NET to standards bodies. Our track record in this space is stellar. We have led the charge in carrying the important standards for Web services to standards bodies - for example, SOAP, WSDL, WS-Inspection, and XML. Furthermore, we participate heavily in cross-platform interoperability testing of our implementations to these standards with community groups such as SOAPBuilders. Web services are an open standard and as the primary integration and interoperability mechanism for .NET, they make .NET the most open platform.

4. What's the argument against delay in making a choice here?

Early adopters of .NET are seeing significant competitive and cost advantages. Companies who begin to make the move now see strong advantages over their competitors. Furthermore the paradigms of application design, deployment, and integration are rapidly shifting to a new distributed model which .NET was specifically designed to support. The distributed model offers significant advantages and failure to capitalize on it could be catastrophic.

5. What security safeguards are built into .NET?

There are many aspects of security in .NET, from the capabilities built into Windows .NET and the .NET enterprise servers through the .NET Framework and on the Web services.

The .NET Framework provides the core of application and platform security. In today's software environment, applications come from many sources and perform many tasks. Trust of the application code is a key requirement because we don't want to risk damage to software or information. A security policy that grants permissions that it shouldn't may allow inappropriate access to sensitive information, or expose the local machine to malicious programs or even just plain buggy code.

Traditionally, security architectures have provided isolation and access control based on user accounts, giving code complete access rights within those restrictions and assuming that all code run by a particular user is equally trustworthy. Unfortunately, isolating code on a per-user basis will not sufficiently protect one program from another if both programs are running on the user's behalf. Alternatively, code that is not fully trusted has often been relegated to a sandbox model of execution, where code is run in an isolated environment with no access to most services.

A successful security solution for today's applications must strike a balance between the two models of security. It must provide access to resources in order for useful work to be done, and it requires finer control of application security to ensure that code is identified, examined, and given an appropriate level of trust. The .NET Framework security model provides just such a solution.

http://msdn.microsoft.com/vstudio/nextgen/technology/frameworksec.asp

.NET delivers Web services capabilities which have their own set of security requirements for building distributed applications within and across organizations, people and devices. To meet these additional needs, .NET's Web services build on existing security protocols such as SSL, XML Encryption, XML Signature, etc. to provide a cohesive open security architecture.

http://msdn.microsoft.com/library/default.asp?url=/nhp/Default.asp?conte...

6. What compatibility does .NET have with J2EE?

Microsoft fully supports Web services across .NET as the interoperability mechanism of choice.

7. What real-world implementations of .NET exist?

We have many examples. You can find detailed case studies, on MSDN.

8. How does .NET performance and scalability stack up against competitive platforms?

See http://gotdotnet.com/team/compare

Microsoft implemented the complete Java Pet Store, Sun's primary J2EE reference application using Microsoft .NET and C#. The .NET Pet Shop implements the same functionality as the Java Pet Store, but does so in one third the amount of code. The white paper contains direct comparisons of the .NET and J2EE implementations, including full source code to the .NET Pet Shop, a new blueprint application for the .NET platform. Microsoft also used .NET to extend the application beyond Sun's implementation with an XML Web Service and support for mobile devices.

The white paper also details how the .NET Pet Shop performs and scales versus the J2EE Java Pet Store. Microsoft took the Oracle 9i Application Performance Challenge, and showed how the .NET Pet Shop offers 28 times faster performance than Oracle's highly optimized J2EE version of the Java Pet Store running on the same hardware configuration, based on Oracle's own published data!

Microsoft has implemented and benchmarked .NET using the Java reference application; why aren't there TPC-C benchmarks posted against any Java app servers?

9. If a company chooses not to implement .NET, what will they lose?

Opportunity costs, competitive advantage, flexibility, ease of development, and deployment.

10. Third-party analysts are telling me .NET is "immature," "unproven." What's the argument against that?

.NET builds off nine years of services built into the Windows operating system - it's a new programming model on top of Windows.