To assist developers, Microsoft is assigning a traffic light color scheme – red and green – to assess .Net Framework updates. Or, if you prefer, a Christmas tree color combo.In a blog entry entitled, “Orcas, .Net Framework compatability,” Microsoft’s S. “Soma” Somasegar, corporate vice president of Microsoft’s Developer Division, described the company’s plan to assign the colors green and red to enhancements and new features. “The approach we are taking is aimed at minimizing the impact of delivering new features and functionality by servicing existing runtime components in-place and then advancing the platform with new assemblies. Internally we’re referring to this as the ‘red and green’ model,” he wrote. “Red assemblies include things like WPF [Windows Presentation Foundation], WCF [Windows Communication Foundation] and WF [Windows Workflow Foundation], which will ship as part of Windows Vista and .Net Framework 2.0 that shipped with Visual Studio 2005. Our goal for dealing with red items is to deliver service pack-like compatibility. We are going to try very hard to minimize the overall number of changes being done in ‘red bits’ to help reduce churn and achieve very high levels of compatibility,” Somasegar said. “Green assemblies are where we will be introducing new functionality into the platform. The aim is to have any new feature be additive (for example new controls) rather than a reimplementation of an existing feature (outside of the servicing I mentioned above). Finally we want to ensure that installing any new assembly will not impact an existing application. For example, for [the] C# language in Orcas, we will make a small “red bits” change to allow you to get at the new compiler and the new compiler is then a “green bits” addition.“If you write a component that depends on a red assembly you can be assured that we’re going to do everything we can to ensure binary compatibility for your code even as we update the .Net Framework and WPF, WCF, WF as we move forward. All the major new features you’ll see from us will appear in the green assemblies so you can feel comfortable that both your new and old code will work on the target machine,” said Somasegar. The effort is “about being more defined in how our model for developer components is going to evolve in the future,” said Tony Goodhew, Microsoft product planner for Visual Studio, in an interview on Monday morning. Software Development