Vendors Debut .NET Products
Jammed exhibit hall showcases vendor products.
by Susannah Pfalzer

VSLive! SF, Day 3, February 14, 2002 — Exhibitors at the VSLive! conference in San Francisco enjoyed an attendance boost from the 3,500 developers thronging the conference's special .NET Day on Wednesday. To packed crowds, more than 55 vendors not only demonstrated products that work with Visual Studio; products such as hardware (AMD Inc.) and books (O'Reilly & Associates Inc. and others) were also represented. In addition, companies such as L'Oréal and Autodesk Inc. were on hand to discuss business solutions they implemented using Visual Studio .NET, whose official product launch was Wednesday.

Many vendors timed new product announcements to coincide with .NET's launch. And those vendors whose products weren't yet available for .NET promised availability soon. A few announcement highlights stood out (unfortunately, space doesn't permit noting news from every vendor). Rational Software Corp. announced its XDE Professional v2002. Infragistics both announced and released several .NET-compliant products Wednesday, including UltraWinSuite (rich-client .NET components), UltraWebSuite (WebForms components for ASP.NET) and the NetAdvantage Suite (a suite that includes UltraSuite, UltraWinSuite, and UltraWebSuite). In another of Wednesday's announcements, /n Software Inc. debuted IP*Works! Internet Toolkit for Microsoft .NET. It's written in managed code specifically for .NET.

Both Wise Solutions Inc. and InstallShield Software Corp. offered installation products that are ready for .NET. Wise for Windows Installer's latest version was released January 11, and offers .NET integration and the ability to create installations for .NET apps. InstallShield's InstallShield Developer 7.02, released in December 2001, offers .NET support as well, with wizards for C# and VB.NET.

ComponentOne LLC talked about its integrated combos: a package including both VS.NET Professional and ComponentOne Studio for .NET. Studio comprises several .NET components, including grid, reporting, data, and user interface components. In other .NET packaging news, Crystal Decisions' Crystal Reports for .NET ships as a part of Visual Studio .NET.

Several vendors discussed new products written in .NET languages. For example, Alphora's Dataphor, a virtual database server, is written in C#. It's in beta now, and due to ship this quarter. In other beta product news, Intel Corp. announced the beta version of VTune Performance Analyzer 6.0, a performance analyzer that supports .NET. It's meant to make performance tuning more efficient; the final version should ship in the April timeframe.

Compuware Corp. announced a product now available in a VS6 version, with a .NET version to come within a few months. That's Distributed Analyzer, a tool that can trace a Web-based distributed app across multiple tiers; it's part of the DevPartner Studio Suite. FarPoint Technologies Inc. announced today a new version of its grid and spreadsheet app, Spread 6.0; it's due to ship next week. SoftArtisans' ExcelWriter's new version is due out in a few weeks, and will work with .NET. Finally, the .NET version of SoftWIRE Technology's graphical VS programming package is available now in a trial version, with the full version available in March.

One thing's clear from the day's vendor announcements: .NET has jumpstarted application development at many companies, and the knee-deep crowds at most booths proved attendee interest in these new products.

About the Author
Susannah Pfalzer is an executive editor at Visual Studio Magazine.