MS to publish free APIs for Windows, Office

[aryayush]

thursday, february 21st

MS to publish free APIs for Windows, Office
Microsoft today quickly halted speculation about its significant announcement by revealing that it will freely publish the application programming interfaces (APIs) and communication protocols for many of its key products, allowing any company looking to use some of Microsoft's techniques for their own software. The access extends to both Windows Vista and Server 2008 as well as the .NET framework that underpins some application code. Office 2007 and Microsoft's latest server suites for Exchange, SharePoint, and SQL are also covered, according to the company. More than 30,000 pages are expected to go online and will include documentation of how the company implements cross-platform standards.



The move is designed to help interoperability between software developers, says chief software architect Ray Ozzie, who also notes that many large-scale businesses depend often exist in a heterogeneous environment where the need to support software from more than one company is often essential. Read more...

[Via Electronista]

[NucleusKore]

Ya, read it here too. Wonder why they're doing it though. Anyway its welcome.

[naveen_reloaded]

watcould this all mean???

[NucleusKore]

Better interoperability. If I want I can switch from using Microsoft Products to Open Source or vice-versa. I guess stuff like moving databases between the two will become easy.

[aryayush]

I'm sure there's no noble intention behind it or anything.

I'm just waiting to hear the opinion of experts on the Internet about what could have prompted this and what's the motive behind it.

[aryayush]

Check this out:



LOL!

[din]

Anyone who know the history of MS will surely suspect something else is there in this move. No doubt.

Well, will wait and see ...

[gxsaurav]

Seems like they want .net everywhere/.

[ax3]

cool move ....... thanx @NucleusKore 4 simple explanation .......

[Krazy_About_Technology]

Yeh! .NET is a technology that needs work on interoperability with other OS platform. On Windows, for me, its the easiest and the fun tool for creating great softwares and services. And keeping its design goals in mind, something should be done so that at least compiled programs run on other platform (same for asp.net on other servers also) whether they are compiled for .NET 2.0, 3.0 or 3.5. The execution engine (CLR) must be ported to other platforms.