Recently I was looking for Hailstorm (.NET My Services) books from my bookshelf to think about how these services would help nowadays. .NET My Services was introduced at the PDC 2001 and never made it to a released product.
.NET My Services makes use of a service fabric and offers several core services: and a few – at that time – planned future services. In the year 2001 all these services were based on SOAP.
Was .NET My Services ahead of its time to not succeed? Would these services be helpful today?
I think some of these services defined before the .NET Framework was released are available now – some from Microsoft, with different names, some from other companies. Many of these services would be helpful to be used from the operating system or applications. Maybe the missing pieces will be available and used from the next version of the Windows operating system.
Here I’m defining a list of the services available with .NET My Services, so in the next step we can add today’s services that are in use instead of .NET My Services. Your help is requested to fill in today’s services.
| Hailstorm Core Services | Description | Today’s Services |
| Presence | Presence information of the user. Where should the user receive alerts? On-phone, off-phone, online/offline/busy/away… | |
| Services | What are the services the user subscribed to? | |
| Notifications | Send a notification from applications, web sites, web services to any person on any device – anytime, anywhere | |
| Calendar | Stores user’s calendar information in one place | |
| Contacts | Store contacts for a user, contacts can also be shared | |
| Inbox | Access to emails from any device | |
| Documents | Secure storage for documents that can be accessed from any device | |
| Wallet | Store information for purchasing items | |
| Application Settings | Store settings from applications, e.g. toolbars, icons… | |
| Profile | Store personal information such s addresses, birthdays… | |
| Favorite Websites | Store favorite websites to be available for the user from any device | |
| Devices | Set up devices – PDAs, pagers, cellular phones that are used to access .NET My Services | |
| Lists | Store any kind of list, e.g. grocery list, wish list, todo list… | |
| Categories | Standardized list of categories that are available across all the user’s services. |
And here is the list of the services that was planned for the Hailstorm future.
| Hailstorm Future Services | Today’s Services |
| MTV | |
| Travel | |
| HighScores | |
| GroceryList | |
| Movies | |
| Music | |
| Stocks |
With the foundation of .NET My Services, authentication was using .NET Passport, SOAP for communication with the services, and of course XML. .NET Passport probably didn’t succeed in the Internet scenario, but there’s a replacement for it as well.
With the services offered by hailstorm, I think many of the services are available today in different form. Some didn’t succeed. I think the functionality of several of these services is available by SharePoint today, and of course in the cloud with Office365. How would you map the functionality of the Hailstorm services to todays offers? Please add your comments!
Christian
I missed the opportunity because I read it late but thanks to post it here and please make me aware in future for these kind of information.
Posted by: paypercloud | 01/29/2013 at 05:54 PM