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Sneak Peek at the Future of Visual Studio .NET
Somasegar delves into Microsoft’s new Express product lines and lifecycle-management tools, global outsourcing, .NET adoption among VB5/6 users, Microsoft’s progress on security, and more.
by Patrick Meader

August 20, 2004

S.“Soma” Somasegar, corporate vice president of the Developer Division at Microsoft and VSLive! Orlando keynote speaker, talks to VSM Editor in Chief Patrick Meader about the future of Visual Studio, including Microsoft’s new Express product lines and its lifecycle-management tools. Also discussed: global outsourcing, .NET adoption among VB5/6 users, and Microsoft’s progress on security.

Somasegar is primarily responsible for all the developer-related languages, tools, and platforms within Microsoft, including Visual Studio, Web Platform and Tools, .NET Framework, Common Language Runtime, and other .NET Developer Platform technologies. He also oversees the India Development Center in Hyderabad, India.

PM: You came to your position after 15 years in the Windows division. How do the Windows and Developer divisions fit together?

SS: The two divisions go hand-in-hand together. We are a platform company at heart. For our platform to be successful, we need rich support from developer tools. We need to give developers of the world a reason to take a bet on writing applications for the platform. So, from day one, we’ve been concentrating on what we can do to court developers from a platform and tools perspective. Coming from the Windows side, I want to ensure the tightest integration possible between the tools and the platform, which will translate to a better and far easier developer experience.

PM: Microsoft seems to be taking a fundamentally different approach with Visual Studio 2005. In the past, what defined the various versions of your development tools was how much stuff you included in the box. The Enterprise Edition got all of the goodies, and each succeeding box down the chain included fewer goodies. This time, though, you appear to be targeting specific users for the Team/Enterprise and Express editions, and to have tailored your offerings around their needs, rather than simply including less and less in different boxes down the chain. Tell me what distinguishes Microsoft’s approach on its Team System product from its Express versions.

SS: One decision we made early in the creation of Visual Studio 2005 was to move away from the idea that one size fits all, that one tool fits all developer needs. Our goal was to create the right product, for the right customer, at the right price point.

Broadly speaking, I’d assert that Visual Studio 2005 is about providing a great toolset for developers. But who exactly is a developer? A 14-year old who wants to get started with programming? You could call this person a developer. The person who says, “This weekend, I’m going to create a DVD cataloguing application so I can track my DVDs better?” You could call this person a developer, too. The person who is sitting in a cubicle writing application customization software? You can call this person a developer, too. The person who has a career building internal process and collaboration software? This person is a developer, too. The person who works for an enterprise company building a line-of-business application? Of course, he’s a developer, too.

All these people are developers, but there is a wide range of what they need and expect from their development tools. We sat down and asked ourselves how we could break their needs down more specifically and deliver tools that catered to their particular needs and requirements. We wanted to create the right tools for the right people, which is fundamentally different than simply including the subset of tools from a larger group of tools that will let them accomplish a particular task.

We looked at the hobbyist and academic developers, and asked ourselves what they cared about in a development tool, then we created a tool that met those needs. We did the same thing for enterprise and team developers, as well as Web and other major groupings of developers. Tailoring the development tools to the specific needs of particular customers was a major component in how we approached creating Visual Studio 2005.