Talking To...

Don Box Discusses Web Services and His New Role at Microsoft

Don Box has long been the preeminent expert on COM, as well as one of the creators of the SOAP protocol. He has written numerous books and articles including Essential COM (Addison-Wesley, 1997) and Essential .NET, Volume 1: The Common Language Runtime (Addison-Wesley, 2002). He has been a longtime columnist and contributing editor for MSDN Magazine and its predecessors, MSJ and MIND. Erica Wiechers, co-host of the .NET Show on MSDN, talked to Don about his role at Microsoft as an architect working on next-generation Web Services.

MSDN Magazine You've been a proponent of Microsoft for years. What made you finally decide to become an employee?

Don Box I had always imagined spending my golden years at Microsoft once I was done at DevelopMentor, although I had never really thought about what that would look like. In September of 2001, I had a chance one-hour meeting with some of the architects and product managers on the XML team in Redmond. They were explaining the Microsoft Web Service strategy both in terms of protocols and platform. During the conversation, they asked me "How far do you think we could take this?" and from that moment I was hooked. Four months later, I had sold my stake in DevelopMentor and was living in temporary housing in not-so-sunny Redmond, Washington.

MSDN Magazine Describe your group and what you are currently working on with Web Services?

Don Box My group owns the core Web Service protocols, plumbing, and programming model. Martin Gudgin and Henrik Frystyk Nielsen (co-editors of SOAP/1.2) both work in my group, as do most of the authors of the WS family of specs.

Along with the protocol work, we also build the software that supports these protocols. This includes both short-term releases such as the Microsoft Web Services Development Kit (WSDK) and all of the Web Services support in the .NET Framework.

The WSDK is an RTW-style project that allows us to get support for things like WS-Security out into customers' hands between major .NET Framework releases. Even though the WSDK is on a fairly rapid ship cycle (and we are revising it as the WS protocols evolve), it is a fully supported product that we expect customers to be able to use in production.

As for the Web Services support in the .NET Framework, we are responsible for the care and feeding of most of the V1 server-side programming model (.NET Remoting, ASMX, and Enterprise Services). Our biggest challenge is to pull the best of these three technologies together into a more unified model. We're doing a tremendous amount of work on delivering on the SOAP vision of message-oriented software integration.

MSDN Magazine What are your hopes for Web Services?

Don Box Honestly, in my ideal future, people will no longer think about Web Services as being novel or an end unto itself. Ultimately, Web Services are just the next evolutionary step in software integration. If we do our jobs well and make Web Services an intrinsic part of the platform, then developers can go back to focusing primarily on building applications. I do believe that those applications will be considerably more interesting in a Web Service-based universe, primarily due to the decentralized nature of integration and development.

For more information, go to the XML Web Services Developer Center at
https://msdn.microsoft.com/webservices.

MSDN Magazine If COM is Love, what are Web Services?

Don Box XML and Web Services are about freedom—specifically, freedom of choice.

MSDN Magazine Do you also have "IUnknown" on your Washington State license plate?

Don Box Actually, my original California plate read "IUNKNWN" due to the seven-character limit. When I saw the light and moved to XML, I changed my plate to "INFOSET" to commemorate the core abstraction in XML, the XML Information Set (see https://www.w3.org/TR/xml-infoset). I hate to admit it, but I have yet to reregister my car now that I've moved to Washington State.

MSDN Magazine Where will Don Box be in 5, 10, and 20 years?

Don Box Hard to say. I hope that within 5 years, the protocol and plumbing for XML Web Services will be in maintenance mode and that I'll have moved up the technology food chain to work on apps. I've had my head buried in the plumbing for over 10 years—it would be nice to see the sunshine again.