More rumours on Microsoft's COOL project, this time courtesy of jTechUpdate (this page uses ActiveX). Tod Nielson, of Microsoft USA is quoted as dismissing the rumours as urban legends. He also added that they were not planning any major releases of their development tools this year. My bet is that COOL will emerge as part of the next incarnation of Visual C++, probably 2-3 months after the release of Windows 2000. It's likely to come with it's own virtual machine and will be touted as the ideal COM+ development environment.
Of course the guy who really knows about this is Steven Lucco, formerly of Omniware, now at Microsoft. Check out some of the papers he's coauthored: Efficient and language-independent mobile programs, Efficient software-based fault isolation, Design and Efficient Implementation of Virtual Machines. Click on the COOL keyword above to see some earlier research into it's origins.