Microsoft: a way to mainstream OLE

RELease 1.0, Sept 18, 1995

Potential Catch-22?

A potential show-stopper for Microsoft in this scenario is network security, which has already drawn the curtain low over General Magic's Telescript (although General Magic's possessiveness with the environment helped hobble it, too) and has caused less concern with Java and Tcl. Telescript and Java were carefully designed with secure transportability in mind; Tcl has a safer version called Safe-Tcl (see Release 1.0, 2-94).

When it was born as the Direct Data Exchange (DDE) capability in the earliest versions of Windows, OLE was not designed with trustworthy distributed applications in mind. As it has matured toward OLE 2.0, it has increased in power dramatically and now offers options and extensibility so varied it is difficult to imagine how they can be reined in. Will distributed OLE objects be secure, or are they a better opportunity for virus coders? Perhaps Cairols distributed object capabilities will help (see Release 1.0, 2-92, 8-92 and 5-94).

RELATED ARTICLE: Blackbird and Visual Basic

Blackbird offers developers a progressive execution environment that is designed to run applications better over online services and the Internet. One could write identical applications in Visual Basic and Blackbird. The VB applications would have to download in their entirety, then run locally. The Blackbird modules would execute dynamically. Also, VB is a programming environment. Blackbird doesn't require programming (though it will have a software developer's kit); it's a tool for professional designers. In Blackbird, developers drag and drop design elements. They can choose custom controls, then modify their property sheets. In a VB environment, they would choose objects, then code them to interact.

Blackbird will have a scripting language, probably C in the initial release. Over time, Visual Basic for Applications (VBA) will be the scripting language for Blackbird. VBA is a script-compatible version of Visual Basic that currently drives Microsoft's Office applications.

Much of what other Web developers hope to achieve with Sun's Java language, Microsoft hopes that its developers will do with Visual Basic, OLE and the Windows architecture. Also, someone will likely write an OLE control to interpret Java, which would bring Java closer to the OLE envirorment.

(5) Blackbird Word is more similar to Word Internet Assistant than to SoftQuad's SGML Author for Microsoft Word (see Release 1.0, 9-94). Eventually, the Microsoft team plans to merge Internet Assistant and Blackbird Word, allowing people to create titles (or pages) for either system.