The January issue always brings a glut of exciting news, and this year is no exception. Of course, this is always related to the fact that the January editor's note is always written in November, just after Comdex. So, this being the January 2000 issue, you're probably expecting a page chock full of "Hey, we survived Y2K!" claims. But you'll find none of that here.
      In fact, by the time January actually rolls around you could be using this magazine as your last, precious kindling before having to venture outside your home, where you'll have to fight off CHUDs and Linux partisans just to get to your stack of firewood. And food? Ha! Even though your supermarket is probably Y2K-compliant, good luck getting there. The CHUDs have already stolen your car, and they're spinning doughnuts on your front lawn. And all because you didn't get around to running that Y2K-compliance software you found bundled in your copy of PC Magazine last September.
      Sure, it's a nightmare scenario, but look at the bright side. You'll have plenty of time to tinker around with the latest and greatest technology (at least for the two hours remaining in your laptop battery's life). In fact, Comdex offered quite a bevy of exciting new products this year.
      We were particularly excited by a couple of new Microsoft products: Shiloh and Office Online. Shiloh is the codename for the next version of SQL Server, which will be an important component of Microsoft Windows DNA 2000. What makes it unique? Shiloh is expected to actually incorporate XML as a native data format. When you issue a SQL query, you would be able to get your results in XML format. If you develop sites with ASP, you've probably slogged through the process of retrieving a resultset and stepping through it to suck out the important data while packing it between some XML tags you crafted by hand. Shiloh makes this annoying iteration a task of the past by letting you pass SQL directly in a URL and getting back an XML stream.
      Although Shiloh is not yet released, you can get a good feel for some of these new features by downloading the Microsoft SQL Server XML Technology Preview from http://msdn.microsoft.com/xml/articles/xmlsql/default.asp. Shiloh is planned for release in mid-2000, and is expected to contain a superset of the XML features in this preview. It's remarkably easy to use if you have even a passing knowledge of SQL and ASP, and cleanup's a breeze.
      Office Online is a new product that shows just how fluid the notion of computing has become. Office Online will consist of the full-featured set of Microsoft Office tools you use today, but it will be provided to users through Windows Terminal Services. This isn't completely new; Office 97 allowed users to access its services across an intranet by using Windows NT Terminal Server. Office Online takes this one step further, providing the same functionality over the Internet for a monthly fee. Of course, Office Online isn't for everyone. Right now, most people will prefer using the standalone package locally. It's a choice that individual sites will now be able to make. However, the new subscription service offers some attractive possibilities, like the ability to run the full suite (or at least a window into it) on palm-size PCs.
      Office Online, which will be offered through the Microsoft bCentral site (at http://www.bcentral.com), is a great example of how we're moving beyond the long-held concept of individual PCs reigning supreme. However, instead of tossing all the power back onto the mainframe (or equivalent), we've reached a new age in computing. Tasks are being increasingly migrated to the place that is most appropriate for them. The Web started out with a client-heavy structure, then moved increasingly to the server to make output to the user more uniform (and to avoid client dependencies). Today, more and more sites are finding a happy medium, where a server page returns some level of code to the client, which is responsible for at least some of the processing.
      XML is a good example of where the future is headed. Depending on the needs of your system, you can have XML processed on the client (as for an e-commerce shopping basket), on the server (using the microsoft.xmldom object to convert it into HTML before sending the stream back to the user), or a combination of the two (XML sent from the server to the client, which filters and formats it with a local XSL file). Tools like Shiloh will make this decision increasingly based on good design and efficiency rather than which tier has the object that can handle the processing correctly. Decisions can be made based on a comparison of local data formatting time versus data transfer time. In other words, future technologies will stand the greatest chance of adoption if they scale as well as XML does across Internet Information Services (IIS) and Microsoft Internet Explorer 5.0.
      What does this have to do with Comdex? We're not sure, but we have about 15 minutes left on this laptop battery, the CHUDs just learned how to use simple tools, and they're not happy that we left the car without any gas in it.

From the January 2000 issue of Microsoft Internet Developer.