REDMOND, Wash., May 21, 2001 — You are a senior technologist at a Fortune 1000 company. You have mission-critical projects, and management needs them all yesterday. You work with development teams located all over the world, all with different ideas about how business solutions should be designed. To top it all off, you are constrained by shrinking budgets and a shortage of qualified people. You have heard that XML Web services can make your development efforts more successful. You wonder how to take advantage of this new development paradigm.
Microsoft Corp. today unveiled the development tools to guide enterprise customers into the new era of XML Web services. Microsoft® Visual Studio.NET Enterprise Architect (VSEA) is a new tool for architects, and Visual Studio.NET Enterprise Developer (VSED) is a new version of the popular Visual Studio® Enterprise Edition development system. The new versions include a series of powerful features that facilitate migration of development teams to the next generation of Web-based computing. VSEA and VSED will enable companies to leverage proven enterprise life-cycle design methods to efficiently build XML Web services, applications made available over the Web via Internet-standard XML, SOAP, WSDL and UDDI, on the .NET platform. In addition, the new versions will provide architects and developers with core reference applications, modeling features and testing capabilities to deliver improved results. This also builds on the Visual Studio.NET Open Tools Platform for third-party independent software vendors (ISVs) that want to plug directly into the Visual Studio.NET development environment.
“Microsoft has worked very hard to deliver on its vision for development and integration of Web services,”
said Daryl Plummer, group vice president and research director at GartnerGroup.
“The Visual Studio.NET Enterprise tools will be one of the first Web services toolsets offering integrated project life-cycle tools and open, extensible APIs. These tools and Web services provide developers with an opportunity to reduce the time it takes to move an application through the development and deployment process.”
Visual Studio.NET will expand the capabilities of software architects and developers by enabling greater sharing of development knowledge and expertise. VSEA and VSED provide software and database modeling tools for visually communicating application architecture and requirements; enterprise frameworks and templates for giving developers a starting point and architectural guidance; and a set of test tools for ensuring Web services and applications are scalable and meet business requirements. Visual Studio.NET with the Open Tools Platform provides complete enterprise life-cycle productivity, enabling teams to seamlessly incorporate a broad range of rich third-party developer solutions to meet their unique development requirements.
“Companies are embroiled in a race to create and deploy the very best applications and Web services, and do so at Internet speed, all with a limited amount of resources,”
said Tom Button, vice president of the .NET Tools Group at Microsoft.
“The new features in VSEA and VSED help development teams take an application from vision to production in record time.”
Customer Excitement
“The enterprise frameworks and templates enable us to leverage our architects and most experienced developers, capturing their expertise and sharing it with the other team members in our organization and enabling them to come up to speed more quickly and deliver on our business requirements in a consistent way,”
said Matthew Drooker, vice president of systems development at Turner Broadcasting Sales Inc.
“The UML-based modeling in Visual Studio.NET will enable us to more clearly communicate across our development teams,”
said Karl Meinhardt, vice president of Technology at Amphire.
“The Object Role Modeling capabilities enable our business analysts to directly input the business requirements for an application, letting developers target precisely the right set of requirements and increasing the effectiveness of our overall development process.”
“By making performance, load and functional testing tools for XML Web services and applications available within the Visual Studio.NET environment, Microsoft has put the powerful tools our developers need within easy reach,”
said Cameron Cosgrove, vice president and chief information officer of information technology in the Life Insurance Division at Pacific Life Insurance Co.
“We will use these tools to help us create applications that meet our scalability and performance requirements.”
Creating New ISV opportunities
Based on today’s announcement and the recently announced Visual Studio.NET Open Tools Platform, Rational Software, a premier member of the Visual Studio.NET Integration Program (VSIP), today announced that it will provide rich support for VSEA and VSED by leveraging the enterprise frameworks and templates to augment the Rational Unified Process (RUP).
“We are working with Microsoft in two major areas to help customers build .NET applications faster and with higher quality,”
said Eric Schurr, senior vice president of Marketing for Rational Software.
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To speed development, Rational is leveraging the enterprise framework and templates by equipping enterprise tools and augmenting the Rational Unified Process (RUP) with tailored .NET content, as part of our e-Development Accelerators initiative (available at http://www.rational.com/eda/ ). To provide the richest user experience, we are delivering new levels of integration between Rational Suite and Microsoft Visual Studio.NET. Together, this work will allow Rational Suite to continue to be the enterprise-level complement to Visual Studio.NET.”
The new features in VSEA and VSED provide unprecedented integration and extensibility opportunities for other third-party ISVs as well. This not only translates into a win-win situation for Microsoft and its large ISV community, but, more importantly, it is an enormous benefit to developers, who reap rewards through a broad range of tool offerings, all available within a single, familiar IDE. ISVs are lining up to seize the new opportunities available via the Open Tools Platform.
ActiveState
“Microsoft’s Visual Studio.NET development environment enables us to deliver Perl, Python, PHP and XSLT programming tools within an easy-to-use and powerful development framework that is familiar to millions of developers,”
said Dick Hardt, founder and CEO of ActiveState.
CAST
“Thanks to the VSIP partnership, our joint customers can now benefit from the seamless integration between CAST Application Mining Suite and Visual Studio.NET and thus drastically reduce the development cycles of their .NET applications,”
said Marc Zablit, vice president of Business Development at CAST.
“Through this tightly integrated solution, Microsoft customers looking to ease their .NET migration will realize in the Cast Application Mining Suite a welcome relief to help them quickly and safely understand their existing applications and migrate them to .NET.”
Compuware
“Microsoft Visual Studio.NET is a powerful development environment that will dramatically increase the market for enterprise e-business applications and Web services,”
said Doug Turner, vice president of product management at Compuware Corp.
“Through the integration of our application life-cycle solutions with Visual Studio.NET, Compuware and Microsoft are teaming to deliver enterprise customers a complete platform for developing global .NET Web applications and services.”
MERANT
“By integrating with Visual Studio.NET, we are making our software configuration management offerings available to a very broad range of enterprise developers,”
said David Carpluk, vice president of strategic alliances at MERANT.
“MERANT wins because Microsoft has expanded the market opportunity for our products. The developers win because they receive a tightly integrated, complete change management solution. MERANT customers win because the Visual Studio.NET IDE provides the core infrastructure for integrating our enterprise change management products, making team development faster and more efficient.”
Mercury Interactive
“Offering Mercury Interactive’s world-class testing solutions to Microsoft Visual Studio.NET enterprise customers will provide developers with the means to ensure their Web applications will integrate smoothly and perform as expected across platforms,”
said Jonathan Rende, vice president of product marketing at Mercury Interactive.
“Using LoadRunner, the market-leading load-testing tool, and WinRunner, the award-winning functional testing tool, Microsoft Visual Studio.NET enterprise customers can verify the performance, scalability and reliability of their Web applications prior to deployment, and help ensure a positive user experience.”
RadView Software
“Enabling developers working in the Microsoft .NET development environment to readily verify the scalability and correctness of Web application components and systems helps reduce errors and enables better applications to be delivered more rapidly,”
said Dan Murphy, vice president of marketing at RadView.
“Working together with Microsoft in the VSIP program underscores our vision of testing early and often throughout the Web development life cycle. We are proud to make this commitment with Microsoft, further strengthening RadView’s own partner network.”
WebPutty
“Both the new distribution model and functionality of Visual Studio.NET are very attractive to application vendors such as WebPutty,”
said Ken Madsen, director of business development at WebPutty.
“The scripting engine can significantly reduce our time to market, and our development efforts as we enhance WebPutty Application Framework SE’s process integration capabilities. This functionality enables the product to offer significant enhancements in Web services with Visual Studio.NET that benefit WebPutty and our customers.”
About Visual Studio.NET
Visual Studio.NET is Microsoft’s rapid application development (RAD) tool for building next-generation Web applications and XML Web services. Visual Studio.NET empowers developers to rapidly design broad-reach Web applications for any device and any platform. In addition, Visual Studio.NET is fully integrated with the .NET Framework, providing support for multiple programming languages and automatically handling many common programming tasks, freeing developers to rapidly create Web applications using their language of choice. Visual Studio.NET includes a single IDE with RAD features for building Web applications and middle-tier business logic, and RAD XML designers for working with data. More information about Visual Studio.NET can be found at http://www.visualstudio.net/ .
About Microsoft
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.
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