What's Really Ahead for VB?
Peek into Microsoft's development lab and see what's on the slab.
by Jim Fawcette

Paul Gross is vice president of Microsoft's Developer Tools division.

Microsoft’s plans and predictions for the next year or so are likely to affect nearly all of VBPJ’s readers. Accordingly, FTP President Jim Fawcette recently interviewed Paul Gross, vice president of Microsoft’s Developer Tools division, to see what turns up when you rub Microsoft’s crystal ball. Here are the highlights:

JIM FAWCETTE: What do you see as key near-term trends for developers and developer tools?

PAUL GROSS: Developers should know two key near-term trends. Most obvious is the Internet's impact-but as an incremental change rather than as a new paradigm, with client/server development tool vendors adding Internet capabili- ties to their products. [Internet capabilities are] encapsulated in Microsoft's Distributed interNet Applications (Windows DNA) architecture, which helps people build distributed, multitier applications, then manage and deploy them across broad environments.

There's also a trend toward components, toward dividing applications into large chunks, to get more reusability of key assets. And people are starting to work more in multiple languages, using HTML as a user interface, script for interactivity, and components built in tools such as VB or VC++.

JF: What about Visual Basic and RAD versus OOP?

PG: Clearly the power alley for VB is RAD (rapid application development). It's professional developers who put their domain knowledge into the application versus getting another 10 or 20 percent performance out of it. Now, between forms and the [native code] compiler, VB is becoming faster-and potentially overlapping some areas where VC++ is used today.

Now we're expanding RAD in Visual Studio to help developers integrate HTML into their applications. They'll lay out a page in a WYSIWYG fashion, then double- click on a button and write code behind it. We're also tackling debugging from HTML and script into a client-side component, or across to the server through a server-side component or an Active Server Page.

Going forward, look for Microsoft's development products to help with end- to-end application development, from planning to analysis and design, to coding, then through debugging, testing, and deployment. And we're working with third parties to enhance each step all through the cycle.