Next week, Microsoft plans to offer an update on new compiler technology that is being co-developed by the company's Programmer Productivity Research Center (PPRC) and the company's developer tools division.

The company will detail its "Phoenix" software optimization and analysis framework at the annual Microsoft Faculty Summit, which kicks off on Monday in Redmond.

See the PPRC Site For More On Its Mission

"Phoenix is the next generation .NET optimization framework which will be the basis for code generation for all future Microsoft optimizing compilers," such as Microsoft's Visual Basic, Visual C++, and Visual C# ones, according to a description of the Faculty Summit session on the technology.

Microsoft plans to make Phoenix available for commercial use as part of a future version of its Visual Studio tool suite, and also available for noncommercial, research use in the form of the Phoenix Platform RDK (research development kit). Microsoft also is mulling a possible "instructional use" license for the technology.

Microsoft is slated to commence a "very limited early adopters program" this quarter, with many of the participants expected to be universities and research institutions. But the first beta of the RDK won't be ready until the fourth quarter of next year. Final public availability of the Phoenix RDK isn't slated until mid-2005, according to a Phoenix time-table viewed by Microsoft Watch.

It's still somewhat sketchy as to how the Phoenix compilation model will differ from those of other development products.

Microsoft is claiming the framework will be able to target a wide variety of 32-bit and 64-bit architectures, including IA-32, IA-64 and other, unspecified RISC processors. The Phoenix API supports a variety of Microsoft-developed analysis, instrumentation and optimization tools. The final Phoenix product will be part of the Visual Studio family of products.

Read More About 'Phoenix' Here

Microsoft first mentioned Phoenix at last year's Faculty Summit. At that time, Microsoft executives outlined Phoenix as the infrastructure that would underlie Microsoft's next-generation of compilers. Microsoft brass played up the code-sharing license via which Microsoft would provide the academic community with Phoenix.