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Everett, Whidbey Unleashed at VSLive!
VSLive! San Francisco, February 12, 2003
Eric Rudder, Senior Vice President of Developer and Platform Evangelism at Microsoft, opened VSLive! San Francisco on Tuesday morning with announcements of upcoming developer tools releases such as Visual Studio Tools for Office Development, compelling demos of the upcoming release of Visual Studio .NET 2003, and first looks at future versions of Visual Studio .NET. The keynote address featured a balanced mix of demos and motivational material on the benefits of using .NET. The enhancements in Visual Studio .NET 2003, formerly code-named "Everett," were demonstrated by Product Manager Chris Flores, who showed off IntelliSense improvements, better migration tools for VB6 code, and new managed data providers for Oracle7i, Oracle8i, and ODBC. An integrated wizard and code snippet converter will make it easier to take existing VB6 control projects and other code and directly reuse them in a .NET project. Attendees also witnessed integration of the .NET Compact Framework and Mobile Device Controls. They saw how to move an application with built-in project types for Smart Devices and Mobile Controls, and how to debug and test the application easily either directly on the device or using a full Pocket PC emulator that ships with VS.NET 2003. Another nice add-on to VS.NET 2003 is a community edition of the PreEmptive Solutions Dotfuscator product, which allows you to recompile your shipping products to an encrypted and transformed version of the IL that is nearly impervious to reverse engineering. Microsoft also announced Visual Studio Tools for Office Development, which will allow the development of office productivity tools and integration using Visual Studio .NET. Group Development Manager Beverly Sobelman demonstrated the tools, showing how you can easily integrate data and Web services into Word and Excel as the "ultimate smart client to Web services." Through a combination of XML enhancements and drag-and-drop tools in Excel and Word, along with VS.NET project types and primary interop assemblies for the Office products, you can quickly and easily tie together disparate data sources to Office documents as your presentation layer. These tools are available in a limited Beta that will be broadened in March to the developer community at large, and finally integrated into the VS.NET "Whidbey" release that will follow the release of VS.NET 2003. The upcoming release of five new ASP.NET Starter Kits was also announced: Portal, Commerce, Community, Reports, and Time Tracker Kits. All provide sample applications and code to help you start developing real-world Web applications using ASP.NET. Product Manager Shawn Nandi demonstrated the Community Starter Kit, which allows development of collaborative sites for sharing articles, books, images, events, and other community-interest items that you might use for a developer site, interest group, or commercial partner community. These Starter Kits are available in Beta on the www.asp.net site. Rudder also emphasized the importance of community in the development and employment of .NET, frequently citing the various forms of the ".NET Ecosystem" and their impact on the evolution and adoption of .NET technologies. Through the empowerment of the Ecosystem, Rudder said that .NET has progressed much faster than Microsoft could've accomplished on its own, and has resulted in quicker-than-expected adoption and realization of the .NET Platform's benefits. The Visual Studio .NET Integration Program has resulted in the addition of more than 160 partners and the release of more than 300 tools for .NET development. The .NET Code Wise Community of speakers, writers, and trainers results in millions of user sessions per month, and the International .NET Association (INETA) includes more than 200 .NET User Groups and more than 700 MSDN User Groups. Performance and scalability were emphasized in a short presentation by Jon Rauschenberger, last year's "Iron Developer" and Managing Director for Clarity Consulting. Rauschenberger has been employing .NET to solve scalability and portability challenges for Bear Stearns, a leading investment firm. By using .NET and XML Web Services, Bear Stearns has been able to migrate its proprietary, mainframe-based services into extensible and accessible Web services. Attendees saw the smaller and more caring side of .NET development in a presentation by Henry Dennig of the Annie E. Casey Foundation (AECF), a charitable foundation that provides funding to disadvantaged-children support organizations. Through ASP.NET, AECF developed its infrastructure services in one-third the time of the proposed Java solution. So the foundation was able to send more funds to the needy children rather than waste them on IT costs. Stressing the fact that Microsoft continues to "obsess about developer productivity," the talk closed with an early demo of the Whidbey release by Ari Bixhorn, Lead Product Manager and host of the VBTV show. This release, which will follow the upcoming 2003 release at some point down the road, focuses on enhancing productivity through controls, editor, and compiler capabilities. These include Edit and Continue for VB, XML code documentation comments for VB, tile view and grouping for list controls, and new abstract capabilities controls such as a sound control, video control, and printer controls. It will also offer enhancements in drag-and-drop of data sources onto the designer that will auto-generate DataGrids or data-bound form controls in addition to the connection and adapters created in the current version. The release after Whidbey, code-named "Longhorn," was also briefly mentioned, but without specifics of what it would include. About the Author |
