All Hail Microsoft: Software giant storms in with .Net

Hailstorm offers a free suite of web services the company believes will draw a global internet membership numbering as many as 100 million within a year. Those types of numbers will be a dream for developers, Microsoft's source of API (application programming interface) support.

In its statement today, Microsoft said: "Hailstorm services are oriented around people, instead of around a specific device, application, service, or network. They put the user in control of their own data and information, protecting personal information and making user consent the basis for who can access it, what they can do with it, and for how long they have that permission."

According to Microsoft, the HailStorm services allow developers to access, for example, an individual's calendar, contact information or documents, from any application, device or service connected to the internet. HailStorm employs the Passport user authentication system to secure an individual's identity and information, and Microsoft claims that its experience of running online services such as Hotmail demonstrate its ability to keep the online infrastructure required for these kinds of application up and running.

eBay has already announced that it will deploy .NET. Meg Whitman, President and CEO of eBay, said: "By taking advantage of Microsoft .NET technology, we can open up the eBay API to an even larger community of developers. We think this will be a big boost for our API and help eBay's business spread further and faster on the web."

All HailStorm services are based on XML, and (according to Microsoft) conform to open industry standards. No Microsoft runtime or tool will be required to use them.

The .NET infrastructure provided by Visual Studio.NET, the .NET Framework and the .NET Enterprise Servers will fully incorporate support for HailStorm to make it as simple as possible for developers to use HailStorm services in their applications.