During his keynote at the Professional Developers Conference here Thursday, Bob Muglia, senior vice president of Microsoft's Windows Server Division, said companies such as AVIcode and Macrovision Inc. will help Microsoft implement DSI.

Muglia talked about how the combination of Visual Studio and DSI allows enterprises to create a bridge between their development shops and their IT operations.

In a Microsoft PressPass interview posted in relation to Muglia's keynote, he said: "Self-managing dynamic systems are focused on lowering the cost of managing IT by embedding and transferring system knowledge in models throughout the application lifecycle and across the organization of developers, IT professionals and information workers. Our Dynamic Systems Initiative (DSI) aims to build manageability into systems, helping customers increase productivity, automate system compliance and boost IT's responsiveness to business needs."

In his PDC keynote, Muglia also shed some light on the upcoming Windows Server 2003 R2 release. Click here to read more.

Indeed, "models change the way management works," Muglia said in his keynote. "Developers can specify all the components in their application and the relationships between them. This is the first step to closing the gap between operations and development."

Dmitriy Nikonov, program manager for enterprise tools management at Microsoft, then gave a demonstration of how AVIcode and Macrovision help support Microsoft's strategy around DSI.

Nikonov showed how AVIcode's Intercept Studio can detect a problem and go right to the snippet of code that was causing the problem. "That's closing the gap," he said to a round of applause from the large audience of developers.

Mike Curreri, chief executive of Baltimore-based AVIcode, said, "The big picture is we delivered this concept for the MOM [Microsoft Operations Manager] audience first and now doing the same thing for the developer side as well. AVIcode is the operations part of design for operations from the Visual Studio point of view."

Click here to read an eWEEK Labs review of Microsoft Operations Manager 2005.

Victor Mushkatin, co-founder and chief technology officer at AVIcode, said his company's approach differs from others'. "Our health modeling is more realistic. We are addressing the dark side of the application—they model for expected behaviors; we model for unexpected behaviors," he said.

Meanwhile, during the PDC, AVIcode announced the general availability of the AVIcode .Net Management Pack for Microsoft Operations Manager 2005. The .Net Management Pack provides real-time, in-production monitoring of custom .Net applications, the company said. The .Net Management Pack is based on AVIcode's Intercept Studio technology, which monitors applications for exceptions and performance issues in pre- and post-deployment environments, company officials said.

Bob Corrigan, product manager for Installation Solutions at Santa Clara, Calif-based Macrovision, said Macrovision is also positioned to help bridge the gap between development and operations.

"Model-driven development is a wave of the future, and we've got some very unique capabilities," Corrigan said. "With DSI [Microsoft has] some strong capabilities in design and deployment, but to deliver a complete end-to-end solution Microsoft and Macrovision teamed up."

Next Page: Macrovision announces bridge.