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Know the Issues

Q: What are some of the biggest technical issues you face when integrating your products into the .NET IDE or the .NET Framework? What's easy about it? What's hard?

Rich Little: We had some difficulties with the sealed classes. Being an imaging provider, we have our own codecs; we have our own file formats that we've developed over 10 years. Some of that was a little tricky. That's probably where we struggled the most, I guess.

Steven Roth: For us, it was very straightforward. Our product was able to slide right in. Our biggest challenge has been identifying all the areas we can hook into, just identifying all the value we can add for developers. And each day we would come up with something new, then see if we could hook into the IDE to provide that functionality. In every case we came up with, there was always a way to hook into things and provide that functionality. It was more a matter of deciding the best implementation. It's been a very smooth process for us, much better than we expected it to be, even.

Bill Taylor: At Rational, we have relatively few complaints about working in the Visual Studio environment. About the only thing to comment on: We had two development teams working at a blistering pace so we could release our XDE product simultaneously with VS.NET. It's a testament to the VSIP program that we had access to the right technical resources to make that happen.

Bill Fisher: One of the things we've seen in common among the various VSIP partners is being able to envision what you can do with VSIP. It's just such a rich set of interfaces that it's not always obvious exactly what kind of innovations you can create with these interfaces, how you can benefit your customers. I guess the good news for the next wave, for the leading edge that is around this table and the people who have built the products in the first wave, is that this first generation of products will set a good example and probably inspire some additional ideas for others who might want to extend the tool.

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