REDMOND, Wash., July 10, 2002 — Microsoft Corp. today announced the delivery of the Microsoft® .NET Architecture Center and the availability of the Visual Studio®
.NET Integration software development kit (SDK), providing enterprise customers with a resource center for architectural guidance and integration tools necessary to help development teams build well-designed .NET applications quickly.
The .NET Architecture Center is a rich online resource for architects that provides them with reference architectures, application building blocks and operational best practices for building architecturally sound enterprise applications. The Visual Studio .NET Integration SDK — until now exclusively available through the Visual Studio .NET Integration Program — provides an advanced set of tools that enable enterprise customers using Visual Studio .NET to integrate company-specific tools, documentation and online communities with the Visual Studio .NET integrated development environment (IDE).
“The .NET Architecture Center provides customers with time-proven recommendations for building .NET-connected architectures, and the Visual Studio .NET Integration SDK lets these customers streamline their development life cycle by unifying their development teams, tools and information in a single environment,” said Tom Button, vice president of the Developer and Platform Evangelism Division at Microsoft Corp.
Assisting Developers From Application Outline to Operation
Enterprises require specific architectural guidance to effectively build end-to-end solutions with Microsoft technology. Through thousands of customer engagements and close interaction with industry partners, Microsoft has established best-practice models, reusable software assets and operational guidance that improve the software abilities and the trustworthiness of enterprise software.
The .NET Architecture Center provides a single online resource that helps unify the technical architect community and offers a simple venue for communicating with Microsoft about architectural issues. With these resources, enterprise customers can improve application development time to market; reduce development costs; and increase the predictability, reliability and manageability of .NET-connected software.
“Through superior architectural guidance and best practices, the .NET Architecture Center will help Sapient reduce development risks and time frames substantially, while still allowing us to deliver the best-quality architecture for our .NET solutions,” said Ben Gaucherin, chief technology officer of Sapient (Nasdaq “SAPE”), a leading business and technology consultancy that participated in the content development process for the center. “Our architects now have one place to go for all the information they need for their .NET applications.”
Much of this guidance is available in Microsoft’s new “patterns & practices” series, which will continue to grow and include coverage for a wide range of .NET architecture, design, implementation and operational topics. The Microsoft .NET Architecture Center is available free of charge at http://msdn.microsoft.com/architecture/ (connect-time charges may apply).
Visual Studio .NET Provides a Collaborative Tools Platform
In today’s dynamic operating environment, professional developers demand not only functionality but also flexibility. Dynamic interactions among team members — architects, developers, testers, project managers and IT operations — are crucial to delivering high-quality applications in a timely fashion. With the Visual Studio Integration SDK, enterprises can unify development teams and provide a common user interface for all life-cycle activities by seamlessly integrating their custom tools, documentation, training and online communities within Visual Studio .NET.
This integrated experience across the development life cycle minimizes the amount of time necessary for developers to learn specialized tools, improves cross-team interactions and enhances enterprise IT communication, thus enabling teams to more effectively build all types of applications more quickly. Visual Studio .NET streamlines the development life cycle by providing a collaborative tools platform for all development resources. Already, more than 130 industry partners provide integrated resources for development teams — including life-cycle tools, programming languages and books — seamlessly with Visual Studio .NET. Using the products provided by these industry partners and now, via the Visual Studio Integration SDK integrating internal resources with Visual Studio .NET, development teams can assemble a custom software development tool set that enhances cross-team interactions and dramatically reduces time to market.
The Visual Studio .NET Integration software development kit is available free of charge through Summit Software for enterprise customers with a Select Licensing or Enterprise Licensing Agreement. More information can be found by visiting http://msdn.microsoft.com/vstudio/partners/ .
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