I had a nice dinner yesterday night with Don Box, Ingo Rammer, Christian Weyer, Christian Nagel, Benjamin Mitchell, Matt Tavis, and Juval Löwy. Don arrived a bit later and started by saying "look, I wanted to have dinner with all of you because we've decided to make some changes to Indigo and by now we've decided to simply bake WSE into Longhorn". Silence. Laughter. No, we didn't buy it and Don couldn't manage to keep the story up for more than two sentences. Dicussions were lively and went from the Windows Kernel to some high level architecture topics and one of the interesting takeaways was that Don elaborated a bit on the "Business Agents" idea he'd been talking about briefly in his CTS200 session. There's apparently a related project Boa (another serpent name along the family line of Viper that was the original codename for MTS), including the business markup language BML (pronounced "Bimmel") that he's involved in and he talked a bit about that, but of course I'd be killed if I gave out more details.

Hello Microsoft Watch readers and El Registraderos: go here for an update. 

Update #2: The nice thing about blogs is that I can update this entry all I want. Understand: This *is* a joke. Read the first few sentences. See, there's a little "April Fools" story right there. If that isn't enough, the codename "Viper" is a bit ancient right... like 1995/1996? Still no good? How stupid is Bimmel? And would I really break an NDA here?  If the press turns this into a story without asking whether there is any substance .... well....   This is my weblog. I don't work for Microsoft. Thank you for your understanding.

Update #3: If you are less interested in blown-out-of-proportion we-have-nothing-better-to-report summer-time "news" and more interested in the big thing before the next big thing (and -who knows- that next big thing might really be "Business Agents", after all) and are therefore contemplating whether Services and Service Oriented Architectures make sense to you, go here.