Project Green and Developers

In addition to being sold as stand-alone products, Project Green applications will also form an important part of Microsoft’s forthcoming business applications platform.

Today, vertical market software companies and systems integrators can build business applications on the Win32 API or the .NET Framework, but must write most of the business logic themselves-a task which may distract them from focusing on their areas of expertise. Another option is to create customized versions of MBS applications (the Navision product line is particularly known for its customizability). But these solutions are bound to one specific MBS product line, each of which has a different code base.

To solve these problems, Microsoft plans to create a common platform for business applications, based on a single code base and consistent set of APIs.

The first part of this platform to emerge, the Microsoft Business Framework, will provide low-level functionality that is deemed useful for all business applications: for example, a common but extensible way to define business entities, such as a customer or vendor; consistent ways to handle common business processes, such as recording a transaction or accepting an order; and services that support desired features, such as interapplication communication, the ability to create reports from business data, and a flexible and customizable user interface. This Framework is being built on top of the .NET Framework, but it will probably evolve to take advantage of WinFX, the next generation of Windows APIs that will be built into Longhorn. Among the improvements in WinFX is support for future Web services standards (code-named Indigo) that solve certain problems that have hampered business-to-business Web services adoption.