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Computerworld - LOS ANGELES -- Jim Allchin , group vice president of platforms at Microsoft Corp., said developing the company's "big dream" for SQL Server 2005 offered humbling lessons that inspired changes in the way the company builds Windows. Allchin went on to describe those changes in software development and talked about how much of the company's resources goes to bolstering software security.
This is Part 2 of Computerworld's interview with Allchin. Part 1 is available online (see "Q&A: Microsoft's Jim Allchin touts Vista, new developer technologies").

Jim Allchin, group vice president of platforms at Microsoft Corp.

The development process for the new version of SQL Server turned out to be a lot longer than anybody expected. There were difficulties integrating SQL Server and Visual Studio. What lessons did you take from that development experience? Good software takes time. It's always a lesson. It's a humbling lesson. And if you have big dreams, big dreams take a while to build. We learned that the deep integration of the runtime itself within the process of SQL, that was hard. That was really hard.
Harder than you expected? Harder than we expected, because we have a situation where out-of-memory problems have to be handled. We can't just take the app down. The CLR [Common Language Runtime] was just what's called fast fail. You just kill the app. Move on. But if you're building an operating system, or if you're building something like a database, you can't go down. You keep going. You handle the error, and you figure out some way to go. So we had to go back and re-engineer. There are paths that we say, from here on, we cannot fail because of out-of-memory. We pre-allocate. We figure out some way around it, so when we make this call, we know it's going to complete and not run out of memory. That's just one example of a painful experience that took us longer than we thought.
The end result's going to be incredibly awesome. The feedback on both of these products is unbelievable. But you know, we had a big dream -- a unified programming model using .Net languages -- and we wanted to do everything else, too. We wanted an incredible advancement in the programming tool, and we wanted to address business intelligence in the SQL Server group. Big dreams.
How did you take the lessons from that experience and apply them to future development, with what you're doing now? A few years ago, we started to re-engineer the engineering process within