Collaborative digital-media applications can help simplify development of rich-media distributed applications. Combining Microsoft .NET and Intel® performance primitives gives developers a basis for these high-performance distributed collaboration solutions that use digital media.

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by Jonathan Kantor, Intel Corp.

Collaborative digital-media applications can help simplify development of rich-media distributed applications. Combining Microsoft .NET and Intel® performance primitives gives developers a basis for these high-performance distributed collaboration solutions that use digital media.

For a variety of reasons, the business community has been exploring new ways to leverage the Web to conduct new and more effective means of business communications and collaboration. The increasing appeal of application services such as video conferencing, webinars, shared whiteboarding, interactive training and distance learning, has resulted in a subsequent rise in demand for these capabilities. This increased demand provides a significant business opportunity for developers seeking to enter this growing market.

Unfortunately, the process of developing a rich-media distributed application can be an arduous task for many developers. With today's high development costs and competing technology standards, developers are often in the precarious position of having to decide in which direction to focus their limited developmental resources. With recent cost and performance advances in server processing power coupled with the improved and integrated capabilities for XML Web services at the OS level, the opportunity to develop a distributed rich-client application for the Windows XP environment on Intel-based platforms has been greatly simplified, presenting new opportunities for the development community.

Solutions such as collaborative digital media applications are unique in that they generally can consume all the processing power they can get. Unlike other tasks that execute in a few seconds, the rendering of stills, audio and video can take several minutes or even hours. Media-intensive collaborative applications translate increases in performance to increases in end-user productivity, and therefore should be written to take advantage of the latest platform technologies in order to boost performance. The combined resources of Microsoft .NET and Intel performance primitive technologies provides a fertile platform for the development of high-performance distributed collaboration solutions that utilize digital media. The enabling technologies that make up this solution category are:

• Microsoft .NET: a set of software technologies that enables collaboration through the use of Web services via a common language "runtime" engine, a platform abstraction layer that provides an optimized environment for application execution. The runtime is the execution engine for the .NET Framework and is responsible for taking handling the communications layer, compiling managed code, verifying type safety, managing the thread pool, executing code, handling memory management issues and other attributes that dramatically reduce the amount of code a developer must write. It is this runtime abstraction layer that is aware of the target Intel® processor and can best take advantage of the processor's unique performance characteristics.