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Microsoft touts Visual Studio’s cross-platform reach



David Worthington
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June 27, 2008 —  ORLANDO—Traditionally Microsoft has used TechEd to evangelize its own platforms. But this year, Redmond took time to showcase how its partners are implementing Visual Studio in cross-platform development.

Microsoft invited interoperability toolmakers, including BMC, dynaTrace, Electric Cloud, JNBridge, OpenMake Software and Teamprise to be presenters during a session highlighting how their software extends the Visual Studio ecosystem to non-Windows platforms.

Session host Terry Clancy, a business development manager for Microsoft’s Visual Studio Industry Partner program, admitted that Visual Studio cannot do all things for all people and that some cross-platform scenarios do make sense. He added that Microsoft was taking action with its partners to extend Visual Studio for cross-platform work.

“Microsoft is not a domain expert in the myriad of platforms and environments,” he conceded. “Our goal is to provide the best platform for domain experts.”

After that, Clancy shifted gears and cast the spotlight on Microsoft’s partners, beginning with an overview of BMC AppSight, a problem resolution system that works with Visual Studio Team System. AppSight captures root cause data to help developers identify application defects without having to recreate problems, according to information in Clancy’s PowerPoint presentation, which was provided by BMC.

Andreas Grabner, a software performance architect at dynaTrace, discussed the technology behind dynaTrace Diagnostics, a Java-.NET business transaction performance management toolkit. dynaTrace Diagnostics analyzes individual user transactions that cut across multi-tiered applications, he noted.

Microsoft’s Clancy then discussed Electric Cloud’s build-acceleration and automation products. The first among those is ElectricAccelerator, which provides distributed parallel builds for Ant and make/NMAKE, as well as Visual Studio. ElectricCommander, which automates the build-test-release cycle for development, works in mixed environments with Visual Studio and other developer tools. It also provides an API for addressing build, test and reporting tools from a single interface.

Wayne Citron, CTO of JNBridge, demonstrated JNBridgePro, a Java and .NET interoperability tool that he said “can join anything Java together with anything .NET,” across the platform boundary, with full API access. He added that JNBridgePro scales from in-process to cross-network bridging.

Mark Manzo, OpenMake’s executive vice president of sales, delivered an overview of OpenMake Meister, an add-on that extends Team Foundation Build, a component of Visual Studio Team Foundation Server (TFS) and Visual Studio to support multi-language, cross-platform and multi-platform builds.

The add-on works by bridging binaries to corresponding source code in TFS through build forensics and dependency discovery, and it consolidates disparate build management scripts into reusable build methods, Manzo explained.

Finally, Teamprise general manager Corey Steffen discussed how Thomson Reuters’s Online Services group  used Teamprise to target multiple platforms, including Java on Linux, Linux64, Macintosh, Unix and Windows, as well as .NET on Windows. Teamprise lets developers access TFS from within the Eclipse IDE.




Related Search Term(s): .NET development, Visual Studio, BMC, dynaTrace, Electric Cloud, JNBridge, Microsoft, OpenMake, Teamprise


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