Microsoft's Live Labs, a standalone product research group, released on Wednesday Volta (download it from CNET Download.com), a development tool designed to make it easier to partition an application's component pieces across a network.
The problem that Microsoft researchers are trying to address is the difficulty of deciding which part of the application runs under which tier--either the client or server.
Typically, developers need to write code to handle the communication between those tiers. And they need to decide during development on how to best architect their applications for optimal performance.
With Volta, developers can make "irreversible decisions as late as possible," said Alex Daley, group product manager for Microsoft Live Labs.
The software, which is an add-in to Visual Studio 2008, lets developers write client-side code and then assign with annotations which code runs where, he explained.
Volta is written using Microsoft Intermediate Language (MSIL) which means that people familiar with Visual Studio languages, including Visual Basic and C#, can work with it. It also is integrated with tools in Visual Studio, including the debugger, and can make applications for Internet Explorer or Firefox.
Volta hasn't been integrated into Microsoft product plans yet, but it stands to have a major impact on how they design tools, Daley said.
"This kind of idea--where we can share a single code base across client server and manage the complexity of communicating between them--is pretty new and has big implications on how we build tools," he said.
Microsoft on Monday made its flagship development tool, Visual Studio 2008, available for download to its developer subscribers.
The product line include several editions, ranging from the low-end Visual Studio 2005 Express for students and hobbyists to Visual Studio Team System, a suite with a server geared at teams of programmers.
Formally code-named Orcas, Visual Studio has features for developer productivity, workflow, data handling, and front-end development for Windows Vista.
The release includes technology called Language Integrated Query (LINQ) which is aimed at making it easier to build applications that tap into different data sources.
The product also includes visual modeling tools, a step in the company's plans to simplify application modeling and make it mainstream. It is based on the latest version of the .Net Framework, the underlying software for developing and running applications written with Visual Studio.
S. Somasegar, vice president of Microsoft's tool division, said that the company sought to include regular customer feedback in the development process.
"When I look back over the last few years at how we were able to ship these two products, I truly believe that both our customer input and our renewed focus on intentional engineering allowed us to release a great product in the timeline that we originally set out to hit," he said in his blog.
Visual Studio 2008 will be formally launched on February 27 next year along with Windows Server 2008 and SQL Server 2008.
I suppose "resurrected" is a bit harsh, since ActiveGrid never really died. More than anything else, ActiveGrid had a hard time explaining just what it was meant to do/be. I'm not very technical, so maybe it was just me, but I heard it explained as an application server and various other things. The true meaning never settled as an easy-to-explain elevator pitch for me.
Now ActiveGrid is back, but this time it's called WaveMaker and its mission is much clearer: help migrate noncompliant client/server applications to the Web. It also has a new CEO/management team, new technology, and a new market: Fortune 2000 developers.
This seems intuitively to be a Very Good Thing (applications are no longer resisting the Web's gravitational pull, and gravity always wins), but it becomes even more so when one considers some blog commentary from WaveMaker CEO Chris Keene:
... Read moreMicrosoft said on Monday it will release the latest version of its flagship development tool Visual Studio 2008 by the end of November.
The company also announced that it has changed the licensing terms for Visual Studio 2008 to allow its partners to build add-on products that work with operating systems other than Microsoft Windows.
It is also allowing its Premiere-level partners to view the source code of Visual Studio 2008 for debugging.
Also, Microsoft announced the community technology preview of its Sync Framework, a software kit designed to make it easier to build peer-to-peer applications.
It also released Popfly Explorer, a tool to integrate Silverlight gadgets built with Popfly into Web pages built with Visual Studio.
Microsoft loves developers, just ask CEO Steve Ballmer. But while the company has been making some of its tools available for free, it also likes to draw the line on just how much gets given away.
According to a report in The Register, the software company has taken an aversion to TestDriven.Net, an add-on to its Visual Studio developer tools. In particular, Microsoft doesn't like the fact that the software works with Visual Studio Express, the free version of the tools. E-mail exchanges between Microsoft and the small, U.K.-based software maker have gotten increasingly testy, having reached the "cease and desist" letter stage.
The dispute seems to center on the fact that TestDriven works with Express, rather than just with the paid versions of Visual Studio. According to the e-mails, Microsoft has given TestDriven's creators until Wednesday to remove that feature from its product.
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