Microsoft Launches Visual Studio.NetMicrosoft Launches Visual Studio.Net

San Francisco--Microsoft on Wednesday launched a suite of software-development tools designed to write next-generation Internet applications, saying the company's most sophisticated customers had demanded the new approach and others should get on board.

The company is introducing a new software layer on top of its Windows operating system, called the .Net Framework, and is overhauling its Visual Studio development tools and server software to create a platform suitable for building and deploying distributed applications that run over the Internet.

Visual Studio.Net, the newly available successor to the Visual Studio 6 tool suite, marks a profound change to Microsoft's platform software and tools to keep pace with the types of applications its customers are building. This new class of Web services applications being promoted by Microsoft, IBM, Sun Microsystems, and other vendors could set the stage for simpler transactions between different business computer systems. "The pioneering developers have really been clamoring for this approach," Bill Gates, Microsoft's chairman and chief software architect, said in his keynote presentation.

Microsoft says Visual Studio.Net and its attendant run-time layer and class libraries will simplify application development for its customers, enhancing productivity by cutting the amount of code developers will have to write. The suite also aims to leverage the power of roughly 4.2 million professional developers schooled in Microsoft's products--most in the widely used Visual Basic language--by extending familiar graphical metaphors to coding the logic of Web applications.

Applications written in .Net also promise to be more reliable, secure, and friendly with Unix and mainframe systems than those developed using Microsoft's old Component Object Model interfaces. The 26 languages supported by Visual Studio.Net now compile code down to Microsoft's new Common Language Runtime, speeding application performance compared with the old method of interpreting code on the fly. And Microsoft is replacing specialized system calls in its server products with Web services standards such as the Simple Object Access Protocol that let distributed apps more readily call their logic.

"There's really no difference between .Net and Windows," Gates added in an interview. Microsoft's entire research and development budget aims to make sure developers can take advantage of all Microsoft technologies. "We spend more than $5 billion a year designing all our software around one architecture," he said.

Unlike programming in COM, Microsoft's Windows development model, .Net applications automatically manage a system's memory and force developers to correct errors. Visual Studio.Net also keeps user-interface code separate from application logic, making files easier to update and manage.

The tool suite will ship in three editions: Professional, Enterprise Developer, and Enterprise Architect. The first two will cost users the same as comparable editions of Visual Studio 6: $549 and $1,079, respectively. The new Architect edition, which includes developer editions of Microsoft BizTalk Server and Visio, will be priced at $1,799.

Microsoft says .Net applications will be more reliable, scalable, and secure than previous Windows apps. In December, the company conducted a top-to-bottom review of Visual Studio.Net's security, per orders from Gates and chief technology officer Craig Mundie. That could help factor more Microsoft products into big-money IT buying decisions.

But if business execs don't understand .Net's benefits, the effort could fall short of expectations. "Microsoft has struggled to market .Net to the business audience," says Dwight Davis, an analyst at research firm Summit Strategies. "Once you get some concrete examples of Web services out there, you'll get more light bulbs going off in the heads of business executives."