LOS ANGELES, Oct. 22, 2001 — On the eve of its annual Professional Developers Conference, Microsoft Corp. today demonstrated tremendous industry and customer support for Microsoft® .NET. Building on open XML Web services as the means to get different technologies to interoperate, the .NET platform provides a next-generation software foundation to connect the world of information, devices and people in a more unified and personalized way. The .NET Platform gives software developers the tools and technology to quickly and efficiently deliver business solutions that span multiple applications, devices and organizations.
“Since the debut of the .NET platform last year, we have seen incredible support from developers and the industry at large for .NET as the premier platform for capitalizing on XML Web services,”
said Bob Muglia, group vice president of .NET Services at Microsoft.
“From the rave reviews for the beta versions of Visual Studio® .NET to the adoption and deployment of .NET Services building blocks, it’s clear that we have entered a new era in computing that will create incredible opportunity and value for developers, businesses and consumers.”
The beta testing program for Visual Studio .NET and the .NET Framework was the largest in Microsoft history, involving more than 2.5 million developers worldwide. The result of this large program has been the creation of a thriving .NET ecosystem, where the following have occurred:
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More than 5,000 customers have deployed production solutions using the beta version of ASP.NET through the ASP.NET Go Live! license. Introduced at the Microsoft Tech Ed conference in June 2001 in response to customer demand, the Go Live! license lifts the beta software license restriction on deploying production applications, enabling customers such as Credit Suisse First Boston, Marks & Spencer, Pacific Life and Telenor to start reaping the benefits of better performance, shorter development cycles and reduced time to market today.
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Sixty Visual Studio Integrator Program partners such as Active State, Compuware and Rational announced they are building hundreds of products that seamlessly plug into and extend the Visual Studio .NET environment.
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Thirty-five independent software vendors including ComponentOne, Infragistics and SoftArtisans announced more than 130 .NET software components, many of which are already top sellers in developer channels.
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Some 60 Microsoft Certified Technical Education Centers (Microsoft CTECs) and 75 independent training companies are now offering classes on .NET development, with more than 200 classes expected by March 2002.
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More than 25 application hosting companies such as Brinkster, EDS and Eraserver are offering services to host .NET applications online.
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Microsoft .NET-related titles constitute four of the top 10 best-selling software programming books today on Amazon.com.
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More than 800 academic institutions worldwide have signed up for Microsoft Developers Network Academic Alliance, reaching more than 200,000 students in .NET development.
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More than 20 programming tools vendors offer some 26 programming languages — including C++, Perl, Python, Java, COBOL, RPG and Haskell — on .NET.
Such support comes just one year after Microsoft delivered the first technical preview of the .NET Framework and Visual Studio .NET. The .NET Framework is the programming model for .NET, while Visual Studio .NET provides high-productivity tools for building .NET applications.
Supporting .NET
To find out more about the business problems customers are solving with the .NET platform, those interested can read about the following companies and their involvement with .NET at htttp://www.microsoft.com/presspass/events/pdc01/material.asp: Accenture, Accor, ArTech, Banco Itau, Bierley (Vail Resorts), Buy.com Inc., CafePress.com, Canadian Pacific Railroad, CBS/Marketwatch, Cotelligent, CSfB, Deutsche Bank, FrontRange Solutions, Global Trade Technologies, Groove Networks, Immedient, Intermedia Communications Inc., Intrinsyc Software Inc., Intuitive Manufacturing Systems Inc., mhe.net, Made2Manage Systems Inc., Marks and Spencer, McAfee.com, NDC Group, Newport News Shipbuilding, OnBoardInfo, Onyx Software Corp./Avanade, Pacific Life, State of West Virginia Dept of Hunting and Fishing (Visalign), Telenor, Toshiba, UNUM Provident, USDA, United Airlines/Centerpost, Wizards of the Coast, Xerox Corp. and youknowbest.com.
In addition, companies making significant news announcements about their developer products and services for .NET include the following: Active State (Perl/Python), Active State (XSLT), Addison Wesley, Addison Wesley-Promotional, Alphora/Softwise, Apress, ComponentOne, ComponentSource, Compuware Corp., Dart Communications, Dundas Software, EdgeRender, Epicor, Hungry Minds, Infragistics (UltraSuite), Infragistics (ASP.NET support), Interactive Software Engineering, Logic Library.Mainsoft, McGraw-Hill, Mutek Prentice Hall, nSoftware, O’Reilly, Rational (RUP), Red Gate, Sams Publishing, Starbase, Summit Software, Sybex and Wrox Press. Information about these announcements can be found at http://www.microsoft.com/presspass/events/pdc01/partner.asp .
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