Microsoft's .Net to be multi-platform

Microsoft has announced plans to unveil software that allows .Net-based web services to run on third-party operating systems.

At an event hosted by Silicon Valley non-profit making group The Churchill Club, Microsoft chief executive Steve Ballmer told attendees: "We will make some announcements on Monday where we'll have ways for people who are not running on top of a Microsoft platform to implement our .Net services."

Ballmer confirmed that Linux would be one of the third-party platforms supported. "Do we have a way for people who host websites on Linux to build on .Net? Yes we do," he said, adding that "Microsoft would provide a way for those Linux servers to use .Net".

In the software giant's .Net vision, there are two kinds of web services: generic horizontal building block services and application specific services.

There are also services and protocols such as XML, Soap (Simple Object Access Protocol) and UDDI (Universal Description Discovery and Integration) that make up the underlying plumbing for the horizontal and vertical types of web services.

Ballmer did not provide further details but said they will be unveiled at the scheduled press conference on Monday at the company's US headquarters.

Microsoft is also expected to announce Hailstorm, a set of XML services for tasks such as authenticating a user's identity and checking calendar information.

The company said that it intends to embrace Java as a full member of the .Net suite of tools to allow developers to write Java applications that interoperate with .Net.