NEW ORLEANS--Further extending its reach into big corporations, Microsoft will tomorrow announce a new
package of its development tools intended to be more enterprise-friendly.
At its TechEd conference here, the company will
announce Visual Studio 6.0 Enterprise Edition, a new version of Microsoft's
development tool bundle that delivers some of the tool integration and team
development features that the company had previously promised.
The reworked bundle also for the first time works with business application
software from SAP and Baan, and includes tools for working with Oracle's database software, an indication
that Microsoft intends to be a more visible player in the enterprise space.
Business objects from SAP and Baan applications can be imported in
Microsoft's repository as COM (component object model) components, meaning
that developers can more easily extend those applications.
Paul Gross, Microsoft's vice president of developer tools, will detail the
new tool bundle in a morning keynote here tomorrow.
Visual Studio 6.0, developed under the code name Aspen, is more tightly
wedded to the company's middle-tier technologies, such as Transaction
Server, Message Queue Server, Internet Information Server, and
interoperability tools such as SNA Server, Gross told CNET NEWS.COM today.
The new bundle also inaugurates a new strategy from Microsoft that
recognizes new realities in the technology marketplace. Fewer big companies
are building new applications from scratch, preferring instead to leave the
work to packaged software makers, like SAP and PeopleSoft.
"The future is people buying packaged applications, or prebuilt
applications," Gross said. "We're focusing on tools that let users assemble
component applications that build on and customize those applications."
Version 6.0 of the Enterprise Edition--which is actually the second
release of the tools package--includes version 6.0 updates of Visual
Basic, Visual C++, Visual J++, Visual InterDev, Visual FoxPro, Visual
SourceSafe. Also included is the Windows NT Option Pack and new 2.0
releases of Microsoft's Repository and Visual Modeler tools.
A spate of new tools are also included with the bundle, such as: Visual
Component Manager, which was included in the previous release of Visual
Studio but has been drastically redesigned; Visual Studio Analyzer, a tool
for profiling distributed applications and locating bottlenecks; new
database schema design tools for Oracle and Microsoft databases; and a set
of tools for supporting Microsoft's BackOffice server software bundle.
Visual Studio 6.0 Enterprise Edition will ship in September. Pricing has not
been announced. The current enterprise version of Visual Studio 97 is priced
at $1,499.
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