Orcas will be designed to take advantage of Longhorn features, including Avalon, the new presentation subsystem; "Indigo," a programming model for building Web services; and the new declarative programming model known as XAML (Extensible Application Markup Language), which is the underlying technology for an upcoming tool code-named Sparkle that will automate Avalon development.

"The big challenge for Orcas is to expose the power of Avalon without burdening Microsoft customers with another massive learning curve," said Mike Sax, president of Sax Software Corp., of Eugene, Ore. "Microsoft is innovating faster than its installed base can keep up with, so it's all about making things easy and familiar for developers."

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Scott Guthrie, product unit manager of the ASP.Net and Visual Studio Web Tool teams at Microsoft, said, "From a programming model perspective with Orcas, we are looking to take XHTML and CSS [Cascading Stylesheets] even further. We are looking at how designers work with developers."

Asked what Orcas is about, Goodhew said it will involve enabling the Longhorn wave, improving the Web developer experience, and extending tools for the software development lifecycle.

Darren Laybourn, general manager of the Microsoft Business Framework, said, "We'll be part of Orcas."

"From a Visual Studio point of view we're filling a hole that has existed in terms of if you look at many of the applications built by ISVs, they use the Microsoft technology but they also build a platform layer in addition to that," Laybourn said. "And MBF is trying to fill that need."

This article was originally published on eWEEK.com.