"I can now have my software turn a monitor off without writing all sorts of low-level plumbing code," Nixon said, adding that his team has reduced development times by up to 25% with WCF.

Even so, Nixon said Microsoft could further improve ease of use for WCF. "They've done a lot, but there's still a lot to do," he said.

Although the WinFX components were initially being tailored for Windows Vista and other future releases of the operating system, applications built with the tools should now be able to run on Windows XP and Windows Server 2003, said Jason Bloomberg, an analyst at ZapThink LLC in Waltham, Mass.

WinFX is an object-oriented superset of the .Net Framework technology that will replace the Win32 application programming interface (API). The third component of WinFX is Windows Presentation Foundation for designing user interfaces. Bixhorn said Microsoft isn't releasing a go-live version of that tool, because developers feel less pressure to start testing the applications they're building with the client-side technology.

The new programming model will be made available this year for Windows Server 2003 and the Service Pack 2 release of Windows XP in addition to Windows Vista, Bixhorn said. He noted that Microsoft is using the WinFX tools internally to develop upcoming versions of its SharePoint Portal Server and BizTalk Server products.