Software Vendors Boost .NET
Vendors show off .NET products at VSLive! San Francisco.

Posted February 25, 2002

True to their long history in the Microsoft world, dating back to prehistoric VBX controls, the third-party vendors are rising to the challenge of making it even easier to develop .NET applications. At VSLive! San Francisco, vendors were out in force to show off their new wares, some .NET-ified versions of old favorites and others as innovative as .NET itself. Not all products were shipping at the show, but 2002 promises to be an exciting time for .NET developers with a few bucks to spend on tools.

A lot of the vendors had cool things to show off. One of the coolest was Compuware's Distributed Analyzer, a tool that brings NuMega's legendary debugging abilities to distributed apps that have components running on machines across the enterprise. An excited buzz resulted from Intel's support for Web services with its VTune Performance Analyzer product. The company that some consider an aging member of the Wintel dynasty is producing tools that make code running on its processors more reliable than ever.

Microsoft has made the VS.NET IDE more extensible than ever before, and several vendors showed off products that plug in as "first-class" members of Studio. ActiveState showed its Visual XSLT and Perl, while SoftWIRE updated its nonprogramming application development interface for .NET. Rational Software makes good design practice easier than ever before with XDE Professional.

Take a look at our listing of .NET products vendors discussed at VSLive!. If you don't see your product here, please e-mail us at vsmedit@fawcette.com. —Don Kiely

ActiveState Corp.
Products include plug-ins for VS.NET, including Visual Perl, Visual Python, and Visual XSLT. Using these plug-ins, developers can program in Perl, Python, and XSLT, respectively, without leaving the .NET environment. The Perl Dev Kit, which includes tools for Perl programmers, also includes a component builder for the .NET Framework.
Availability: Now
Web address: www.activestate.com

AlachiSoft Corp.
TierDeveloper is an object-to-relational mapping and code-generation tool that lets you generate and design middle-tier data objects. It generates components in C# and VB.NET.
Availability: NOW
Web address: www.alachisoft.com

Alphora
Dataphor, written in C#, is a virtual database server that enables communication with RDBMS, while the front end provides a logical abstraction of interface definitions.
Availability: Q1 2002
Web address: www.alphora.com