Microsoft HealthVault is Now Unlocked!
Today, the Health Solutions Group is reinforcing its commitment to interoperability with the public disclosure of three things:
1. First, Microsoft is demonstrating our commitment to cross-platform development by establishing a set of open "wrapper" libraries that facilitate HealthVault development across a broad set of environments. This week we created a Codeplex project to house the first of these libraries under the Microsoft Public License, for the Java environment. As we continue to engage with partners on other platforms, we will continue to create similar projects and solicit active participation from the HealthVault community.
2. Second, over the next few months (late Spring) we will be releasing our complete .NET SDK on Codeplex under the Microsoft Reference License -- meaning that full source code will be available, but that Microsoft retains control over updates to this specific project. We have heard from partners that they want to have one place to go to understand the "official" way of interacting with HealthVault, so ensuring that only we make updates to this project makes sense. But by making the full and complete source code for the .NET SDK available, there will never be any question about how Microsoft has implemented HealthVault functionality, nor will there be any fear that developers will miss out on particular HealthVault capabilities by choosing an alternate development platform.
3. Finally -- and most importantly -- we will release the HealthVault platform XML interface protocols -- the stuff required to recreate and re-implement the HealthVault service -- under the Microsoft Open Specification Promise (OSP).
This exciting development for HealthVault is described in detail on Sean Nolan’s blog http://www.familyhealthguy.com/
