Vendors Rally Behind .NET Framework

Development tools, components timed to Visual Studio.NET release

By David Rubinstein

July 15, 2001 —

ATLANTA - While most of the third-party software companies exhibiting at Microsoft's Tech-Ed conference were offering tools for storage management, performance tuning and systems administration, the show floor also hosted developed tools targeted at e-business and Web applications.

Open-source-tool providerActiveState Inc.released Visual Perl, Visual Python and Visual XSLT for Microsoft's Visual Studio.NET beta 2. These tools will allow developers to develop for those languages using Microsoft's Visual Studio.NET IDE, according to ActiveState senior developer Eric Promislow. At the end of May, ActiveState also was due to release PerlNET, a separate product included in ActiveState's Perl Developers' Kit, which Promislow explained is a way for developers to create .NET components from native Perl, using a compiler that brings Perl code into Microsoft's .NET Framework Intermediate Language. Visual Perl is available for $495; the other two language kits are available in beta as free downloads fromwww.activestate.com/aspn.

Fujitsu Software Corp.is integrating its COBOL compiler into Visual Studio.NET through Microsoft's Visual Studio Integration Partner program. The company claims this integration will help speed integration of legacy code into Web-enabled applications through a single development environment. The company plans to release the upgraded product later this year.

IT Factory Inc.announced a visual development tool for collaborative knowledge management applications on Microsoft's Exchange 2000 and SharePoint Portal Servers. The ITF Development Center provides an interface within Microsoft's Visual InterDev Web development system, according to the company, which developers can use to speed creation of applications. Developers use the visual development tool for objects, properties and methods, while the Development Center automatically maps and links to Exchange or SharePoint through a server extension that also enables creation of SOAP objects. A runtime server extension allows developers to incorporate collaborative capability such as threaded discussion management into their applications. Development Center is expected to be available later this month at a starting price of $1,495 per developer.

Mainsoft Corp.previewed Visual MainWin for .NET, an application-porting platform that lets developers compile or take Visual C++ applications natively to Unix and Linux platforms, according to area technical manager Andy Milo. With a configuration control panel integrated into Visual Studio.NET, developers can deploy applications to multiple targets from within the IDE to provide native code, not merely emulation, he said. Pricing has not been set; the tool is expected to ship toward the end of the year. Unix platforms supported include AIX, HP-UX and Solaris.

For companies assembling Web services based on data culled from large, complex databases,Antarcti.ca Systems Inc.has made available Visual Net Enterprise, a graphical search and discovery tool that enables users to browse through data and get a visual display of the metadata presented as a large-scale map, according to the company.

COMPONENTSSeveral component vendors stepped forward with new products that target the .NET platform and will become available when Visual Studio.NET becomes generally available late this year.

Infragistics Inc.is now shipping version 2 of its UltraSuite and UltraGrid components, and previewed UltraGrid for .NET. New features to UltraGrid, which is now included in UltraSuite, include printing and print-preview capabilities as well as improved data formatting. New extensibility features in UltraGrid include a way to rotate column headers and to get band totals, according to Bob Wolf, vice president of sales and marketing.

Also, Infragistics released into beta UltraServerTree, which renders HTML or DHTML to a browser with no controls necessary, and UltraListBar, a Windows Forms control that applies appearance properties to the controls. They are available atwww.infragistics.com. Wolf said he expects UltraServerTree Studio, an applet for designing and rendering trees to HTML, to be integrated into Visual Studio.NET as a design tool.

ComponentOne LLCannounced add-ons to Visual Studio.NET, including components for charting, querying, reporting, print preview and help authoring, as well as grid controls and data components that take advantage of ADO.NET. Channel sales manager Michael Ross said the products will become available around the same time that Visual Studio.NET is released late in the year.

Protocol components fromVisualSoft Technologies Ltd., such as VisualSoft FTP Web Service and VisualSoft HTTP Web Service, will complement the .NET Framework with such services as data transfer, management and presentation, according to the company. Web services or applications developed in any language can access the FTP Web Service from any device to ease file transfers. FTP Web Service can abort a data transfer or resume transfer after a network crash, according to the company. Web Service provides access to the HTTP protocol for authentication, file uploading from a local server to a Web server, and posting data to or deleting files from a Web server.

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Microsoft releases .NET Micro framework as open source The new version of the framework packages source code for distribution, but cryptography libraries are not included

.NET Micro Framework 3.0 to work with native code Microsoft has made interoperability with unmanaged code a key design element of its upcoming 3.0 release of the .NET Micro Framework. Other additions to the framework, including WiFi support, were announced at TechEd.

Going 'all in' on .NET as default runtime Programmers for Windows Phone 7 will need to use Silverlight and XNA for development

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