REDMOND, Wash., March 5, 2001 — Microsoft Corp. today announced the Visual Studio® .NET Open Tools Platform, a set of three core technologies that enable developers, independent software vendors (ISVs) and language vendors to use Microsoft® Visual Studio.NET as a complete platform for developing and customizing next-generation Web Services and applications. The Open Tools Platform is designed to facilitate productivity, flexibility and tight integration, which in turn gives customers a more complete set of solutions tailored to their specific needs.
At the core of the Open Tools Platform is Visual Studio.NET, Microsoft’s flagship developer tool for building Windows® – and Web-based applications and services while leveraging industry standards such as XML, SOAP and UDDI. Visual Studio.NET provides an open automation model, enabling developers to customize, extend and integrate the development environment right out of the box. With this capability, developers can tailor the environment to their specific needs, using macros, add-ins and wizards to maximize their productivity. For example, using macros a developer can build a macro for two-way synchronization with the Microsoft Outlook® messaging and collaboration client that takes tasks from Outlook and adds them onto the Task List in the Visual Studio integrated development environment.
In addition to this deep extensibility model for developers, the Open Tools Platform gives ISVs and language vendors deep integration and customization abilities through the Visual Studio Integration Program. The Visual Studio Integration Program enables ISVs and language vendors to integrate their products and services directly into the Visual Studio.NET development environment through a new software development kit (SDK), the Visual Studio Integration SDK. It also enables ISVs to give their customers the ability to easily customize and extend their applications to fit that specific customer’s needs through the new Visual Studio for Applications SDK.
“To succeed in today’s dynamic operating environment, developers need to maximize productivity and deliver applications that can easily adapt to the changing needs of their customers,”
said Tom Button, general manager of the Developer Division at Microsoft.
“The Visual Studio.NET Open Tools Platform provides developers with the tools they need to quickly create next-generation applications that are not only powerful and scaleable, but also fully customizable.”
The Visual Studio Integration Program was created to provide licensees the opportunity to deeply integrate with and take advantage of Visual Studio, the industry’s leading development tool. Visual Studio Integration Program partners, including tools vendors, language vendors, ISVs, academics and researchers, all receive the Visual Studio.NET Integration and Visual Studio for Applications SDKs. Currently, more than 50 companies are actively evaluating the Visual Studio Integration Program technologies, and over 30 companies have signed up and announced their product intentions. Integrating their products with Visual Studio.NET gives Visual Studio Integration Program partners value-added focus on their company’s offerings, while broadening their reach to the millions of Visual Studio developers. In return, Visual Studio developers are provided with additional functionality such as productivity add-ons, life-cycle tools and additional programming languages.
“The Open Tools Platform enables our customers to exploit the full power of XML and Web Services enabled by Visual Studio.NET and the .NET Framework,”
said Diane Mueller, director, Productivity Solutions at ActiveState.
“ActiveState’s Visual Perl and Visual Python IDEs allow programmers to leverage popular open source programming languages within the .NET Framework and offer support for Web Services.”
“Visual Studio.NET Integration allows us to satisfy our customers’ demand for maximum productivity and seamless integration of our DevPartner Studio product family with Visual Studio.NET,”
said Doug Turner, vice president of Product Management at Compuware.
“By using the Open Tools Platform and integrating our product into the familiar environment of Visual Studio, we enable our customers to produce enterprise-critical applications more effectively and reduce their time to market.”
“We believe that Visual Studio for Applications will transform our pensions and mortgage administration applications into complete development platforms that provide the agility to adapt to our customers’ ever-changing needs,”
said Mike Lloyd, technical strategy manager at UK-based financial solutions provider Marlborough Stirling.
“Microsoft’s Open Tools Platform should save Marlborough Stirling time and resources by enabling our development teams to focus on their core competencies.”
This announcement affects the entire life cycle of applications being built with Visual Studio.NET. It provides ISVs and corporations with a competitive advantage by enabling them to develop and deploy enterprise-critical applications that adapt to their needs and their customers’ needs. In addition, the Open Tools Platform empowers the more than 6 million professional developers worldwide to have access to an unprecedented degree of flexibility to customize, integrate and automate the Visual Studio.NET environment, maximizing their productivity and reducing time and labor costs associated with applications development.
Founded in 1975, Microsoft (Nasdaq
“MSFT”
) is the worldwide leader in software, services and Internet technologies for personal and business computing. The company offers a wide range of products and services designed to empower people through great software — any time, any place and on any device.
Microsoft, Visual Studio, Windows, Outlook, Visual C++ and Visual Basic are either registered trademarks or trademarks of Microsoft Corp. in the United States and/or other countries.
The names of actual companies and products mentioned herein may be the trademarks of their respective owners.
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Visual Studio Integration Program Partner Contact Sheet
Compuware
With fiscal year 2000 revenues of more than $2.2 billion, Compuware is a world leader in the practical implementation of enterprise and e-commerce solutions. Compuware provides software solutions that span the application lifecycle and is a full participant in the Visual Studio Integration Program program committed to providing .net solutions, including DevPartner Studio designed to help developers automatically detect, diagnose and facilitate resolution of software errors; maximize code performance; and ensure optimum code coverage and testing. For more information, visit Compuware at www.compuware.com
Karen Sigman, Business Alliance Manager to Microsoft
(425) 868-7477
[email protected]
Rational
Rational Software Corporation (Nasdaq: RATL), the e-development company, helps organizations develop and deploy software for e-business, infrastructure, devices and embedded systems through a combination of tools, services and software engineering best practices. Rational is moving towards a tight integration of their full enterprise life-cycle development solution, including market-leading products such as Rational Rose and Rational ClearCase, with Visual Studio.NET providing .NET developers with a complete set of tools, services and best practices, accelerating time to market, and improving quality.
Bill Durling
(781) 372-5886
[email protected]
Stingray Software
Stingray established its reputation as experts in MFC development with its flagship products Objective Toolkit and Objective Grid 6. UML Studio is a Visual Studio-integrated UML tool targeted for every Microsoft Visual C++ programmer, and is designed specifically to help you visualize your project design and dynamically generate class diagrams inside the Microsoft Visual C++ IDE.
Niccole Winn
(919) 395-7102
[email protected]
NeoVision Systems
NeoVision Systems is a leader in e-Development Automation software products and professional services. Visual iRAD is an e-Development Automation software development environment for the Microsoft .NET platform that includes reverse engineering and n-tier code generation tools that deliver immediately working n-tier Internet applications.
Sandra Wagner
(248) 362-1725
[email protected]
Data Dynamics, Ltd.
Data Dynamics, Ltd., provides award winning, leading edge software tools and controls to application developers. Data Dynamics, Ltd.’s ActiveReports is a product for developers who need to generate a wide variety of reports from their applications, ActiveReports is a full report writer that is powerful and easy to learn: ActiveBar-ActiveBar 2.0 removes the limitations of the system menus and toolbars and allows you to provide complete runtime customization and personalized environments in your applications.
Tim Moffatt
(614) 895-3142
[email protected]
InCert Software Corporation
InCert’s Application Fault Management solutions help organizations maximize application availability by providing advance warning and promoting rapid resolution of application faults and failures. TraceBack detects and alerts support and operations personnel to hung or crashed applications in production and delivers a detailed, root cause analysis of the code problems that caused the fault.
Jeff Mulligan, Vice President of Marketing
(603) 315-3456
[email protected]
RadView Software Inc.
The fastest growing provider of solutions for verifying the performance, scalability, and integrity of business critical web applications. RadView’s Web Load, integrated with Visual Studio.NET, will enable platform developers to easily verify the performance and scalability of web applications throughout the development lifecycle within the familiar Microsoft .NET Framework.
Theresa Edo
(781) 238-1202
[email protected]
ActiveState
ActiveState is at the forefront of open source software, providing Internet programming products and services for all popular operating systems and platforms. ActiveState’s key technologies are Perl, the Internet’s most popular programming language, Python, a user-friendly scripting language, and XSLT, the XML transformation language.
Visual Perl is a full-featured integrated development environment that includes all the features of a modern IDE such as rich syntax aware editor, method tips, online help and debugger support. Currently under development, Visual Python is a plug-in for Microsoft’s next-generation development environment, Visual Studio.NET.
Lori Pike
(604) 808-6655
[email protected]
Marlborough Stirling
Marlborough Stirling is a United Kingdom-based financial solutions provider.
Mike Lloyd, Technical Strategy Manager
[email protected]
+11 (01242) 698209
Intel Corporation
Intel, the world’s largest chip maker, is also a leading manufacturer of computer, networking and communications products. Intel VTune performance analyzer – A tools to help developers extract maximum performance from their software running on Intel based platforms C/C++/Fortran compilers and debuggers – Highly optimized compilers that utilize latest advanced features in Intel processors.
Jon Khazam
(408) 765-5346
[email protected]
Mutek Solutions, Ltd.
Mutek Solutions, Ltd develops and markets software solutions that improve the availability of business critical software applications.
Aimee Potter
(919) 878-3717, ext. 239
[email protected]
BugTrapper
BugTrapper is a product specifically designed for Visual Studio applications running on the Windows Platform that monitors, records and plays back (forward and reverse) the
line-by-line code execution of any compiled Visual C++ or Visual Basic® application running in its deployed environment.
SoftWIRE Technology, Inc.
Developer of the SoftWIRE graphical programming environment and tools for Visual Studio. SoftWIRE is a graphical programming extension to Visual Studio which allows non-programmers to create meaningful VS.net applications. SoftWIRE is to programming what the browser was to the Web.
Andrew White
Ben Bailey
Bob Judd, Vice President of Marketing
(508) 946-8900
Fujitsu Software Corporation
Fujitsu Software Corporation, a member of the Fujitsu Group of companies, provides leading edge software solutions for enterprise customers. In conjunction with Fujitsu’s announced support for COBOL in the .NET Framework, Fujitsu is integrating its leading edge COBOL compiler into the Visual Studio.NET platform.
Ron Langer, Director of Languages
(541) 317-0624
[email protected]
Crystal Decisions (formerly named Seagate)
Crystal Decisions is an information infrastructure company that leads the market in reporting, analysis and information delivery. Our solutions help customers make better business decisions by bringing together their people and their information. We provide a standardized, Web-based information infrastructure to help customers access their disparate data sources such as Enterprise Resource Planning (ERP) and Customer Relationship Management (CRM), and distribute secure interactive reports and analysis to every end user, customer and partner. We are a leading information infrastructure company with best of breed reporting and analysis solutions and have shipped ten million licenses of our award winning software.
Alison MacDonald
(604) 602-5260
[email protected]
Epicor Software Corporation
Epicor Software Corporation is the world’s largest enterprise software supplier focused exclusively on mid-market companies. Epicor delivers comprehensive, proven and flexible solutions enabling eBusiness across the enterprise – from front office operations like sales automation, marketing, customer relationship management (CRM), service and support, to back office operations including accounting, budgeting, analysis, distribution and manufacturing. Epicor is an Early Adopter of Visual Studio for Applications which allows for customization on the middle tier. Epicor is currently developing products that will take advantage of Visual Studio for Applications.
Lisa Preuss
(949) 585-4235
[email protected]
netIQ
netIQ is a leading provider of solutions for managing e-business infrastructures. Their award winning products reduce the cost of operations while dramatically increasing the security, performance and availability of Microsoft Windows-based e-business solutions.
netIQ is an Early Adopter of Visual Studio for Applications which allows for customization on the middle tier.
Susan Torrey
(713) 548-1863
[email protected]
Ci Technologies Pty Limited
Ci Technologies Pty Limited is a global leader in the development and application of SCADA and HMI software for industrial automation. Citect for Windows is one of the world’s top PC-based process monitoring software packages with over 33,000 licenses sold. There are presently over 80 Citect distributors worldwide with sales and support offices in Australia, the United States, Europe and China.
Ci Technologies is an Early Adopter of Visual Studio for Applications which allows for customization on the middle tier.
Steve Schilg
(612) 9855-1000
[email protected]
Note to editors: If you are interested in viewing additional information on Microsoft, please visit the Microsoft Web page at http://www.microsoft.com/presspass on Microsoft’s corporate information pages. Web links, telephone numbers and titles were correct at time of publication, but may since have changed. For additional assistance, journalists and analysts may contact Microsoft’s Rapid Response Team or other appropriate contacts listed at http://www.microsoft.com/presspass/contactpr.asp .
