Interoperability ... the next frontier
We have taken huge flak for introducing the Linux/Microsoft picture as part of our architecture and technology core unit objectives. The objective is not to fuel the political and unnecessary open source versus proprietary versus everything else debate, but instead to highlight the fact that we are and have to interoperate, integrate and coexist in highly complex heterogeneous solutions in the real world. There will be no A versus B versus C, but instead a A with B with C environment in our world.
In a future technology event we will demonstrate Team Foundation Server (TFS) ... my real passion ... in a heterogeneous development environment and Linux-Mono-WCF collaborating as one really excited and happy family. We will also continue our passionate integration and interoperability research ... we are probably one of the first teams running a virtualised instance of the Windows Server 2008 operating system on a Linux/XEN server.
I wholeheartedly agree with my colleague who stated: "I am tired of the them and us, I know between us we joke about it, but I believe as a company we do not have the luxury of telling our clients what they will run, rather be able to adapt to their needs, in any case it is arrogant to think like that and many companies have disappeared because of that kind of arrogance..."
In fact, we recently ran a competition for the kids of those that attended our Linux/XEN virtualisation readiness session. Here are two of the winning "Mumbles" submissions:
