SAN FRANCISCO (02/16/2000) - Microsoft Corp. announced plans today to gear up its Visual Studio 7.0 development tool for Web development.
As part of the Redmond, Wash.-based computing giant's Windows DNA push, Microsoft wants to revamp its tool set to allow developers to create enterprise-level Web applications. Microsoft President and CEO Steve Ballmer gave a demonstration of the new Web capabilities at the Visual Basic Insider's Technical Summit in San Francisco.
"We are giving you compiled code options, which are not available today, and which can be used in the way that people build Web sites," Ballmer told about 2,000 developers at the summit. "And we are giving you tools that let you target absolutely any browser from any of the Visual Studio languages, including Visual Basic."
Visual Studio 7.0 will include new utilities for creating Web Forms, Web Services and enhancements to improve Visual Basic performance.
Based on Microsoft's Active Server Pages, the new Web Forms capability allows developers to create Web pages using components. The utility also executes compiled code onto Web servers. In previous versions, HTML code was intermixed with Visual Basic script. The new release separates HMTL from the Visual Basic code and utilizes the full language, which provides faster performance, officials said.
Part of Microsoft's ongoing Simple Object Access Protocol (SOAP) initiative, Visual Studio will offer XML and HTTP-based Web Services. This will allow developers to create remote procedure calls, which enable Visual Basic applications to process service requests from other applications on intranets and the Web.
The performance enhancements include support for free threading, code inheritance, overloading and polymorphism.
Ballmer Visual Studio 7.0 would ship by year's end.
Mark Driver, an analyst at Gartner Group Inc. in Stamford, Conn., lauded Microsoft's developer tools initiative, which he said will help extend the skills of Visual Basic developers and generate better interoperability between Microsoft technologies and the other platforms found in enterprise computing environments.
Microsoft officials said approximately 3.2 million developers use Visual Basic.
Gartner Group pegs the number of Visual Basic developers at closer to 2.4 million and estimates that there are approximately 500,000 Java developers.
Driver said offering new Web capabilities will prevent Microsoft developers from moving to other Web-based languages, like Java, to develop scalable, Internet applications.
Ballmer also said a Visual Studio 6.0 tool kit would be available next month.
The tool kit will include an add-in for building Web services into Microsoft's Internet Information Server. It will let developers begin creating applications that use objects from other Web sites.