Back to Extending VS.NET Home

Looking Forward

Q: The .NET Framework Class Library provides a lot of powerful functionality out of the box. Some of it is a snap to code with; some of it's a little bit harder due to the complexity that accompanies this capability. What do you see as a path for new class libraries to be built from the .NET Framework?

Dean Guida: Not to repeat myself, but we saw an opportunity to build a unified application framework. We're also exposing that out to our customers where they can leverage our shared assemblies if they want to build presentation components and get for free what we built in. For example, when you inherit from our framework, you automatically get XP theme support; you get advanced UI capabilities, gradients, transparencies, a lot of these different UI capabilities. So we extended it through our Presentation Layer Framework.

Basim Kadhim: I think what Dean is pointing out is that it's probably a little limiting to talk about just class libraries because the .NET Framework provides a lot of class libraries right out of the box. Frameworks are going to be a lot more interesting to a lot of customers in the future. Dealing with the framework issue means you get a much more powerful set of things that are targeted at specific problem domains.

Peter Varhol: I think a prime example of that is the VSLive! presentation of the GIS framework from AutoDesk. I think there's a potential for us to be able to see more in the way of powerful, vertical solutions being developed from the .NET Framework. One of things I think is important here: Developers are constantly looking for higher and higher levels of abstraction. Visual Studio takes one more step in that direction. But I think the extensibility and the ability to develop vertical frameworks will enable developers within those vertical markets to work at still higher levels of abstraction.

Steven Roth: The natural path will be extended further by companies like ours and Infragistics and Lead Technologies because not only will these object frameworks make individual applications richer, but it will mean that your customers get a better user experience because you'll be able to use extensions from one company within the extensions of another. For example, COBOL.NET developers will be able to access imaging components from Lead Technologies or from Rational. The third-party benefits for the end user will be cumulative, which is a really powerful model.

Robert Green: One of the things you'll find as a developer—and we designed it this way intentionally—is that the Framework is fairly deep and it's also rich, but it's also approachable. One of my favorite demos is to show you can add performance counters to your applications in only a couple lines of code. Or you can write an NT service, which used to be dozens of lines of code, in only two or three lines of code because there are some really slick things in the Framework. A lot of the plumbing stuff you used to have to write yourself is now just embedded in the class. At the same time, you're able to dive down into the Framework as deep as you need to.

Basim Kadhim: There's some commonality you get by having all these frameworks target one set of infrastructure for users such as COBOL programmers who might have found it difficult in the past to learn all the specifics of every framework or technology they were dealing with. To some extent, they will have to learn the design principles of these frameworks. But once they do that, once they learn how to use .NET classes, how to use inheritance, how to use the syntax of a given language, they get a lot of extensibility from all the other frameworks and capabilities that sit on top of one another.

Mani Gill: One of the things demonstrated at VSLive! was the ability to build toolkits off of SQL Server or BizTalk Server. You can start thinking of other third-party vertical applications. We've got an enterprise reporting application, if you wrap that with a toolkit—you can sort of do that today with VB6, but there wasn't an easy way for developers to approach that. Now, I can expose this through the Server Explorer, and it's simply treated like another object, the way everything else is in VS.NET.

Know the Issues