Microsoft To Unveil Visual Studio.NetMicrosoft To Unveil Visual Studio.Net

IT buyers attending Microsoft's Tech Ed 2001 conference in Atlanta this week will get a first look at the second beta release of Visual Studio.Net. Chairman Bill Gates will take the stage to unveil the latest beta version of the suite of development tools and runtime software for building components that systems can address using Web protocols.

Also in the lineup: Senior VP Paul Flessner will chart a technology road map for the SQL Server database, which the vendor says surpassed $1 billion in sales for the fiscal year that ends June 30, up from more than $700 million last year. And Microsoft will ship its new Mobile Information 2001 Server, for publishing Outlook and other apps' data on mobile phones.

Users say Microsoft's plan to "Webize" any component using XML and the Simple Object Access Protocol is on target. Companies have spent the past five years assembling middleware that transforms data about their businesses for broadcast over the Web. But programming standards such as Microsoft's Distributed Component Object Model and the Java Remote Method Invocation were designed to work inside firewalls. The promise of Internet-based trading and collaboration means companies must forge a new software vocabulary, based on standards such as Soap. "Customers have to be ready for a new challenge," Flessner says.

The movement's just finding its feet. In an April Morgan Stanley Dean Witter survey of 225 CIOs, 41% said less than 10% of customers interact with their companies online. Two-thirds do E-business with less than 10% of their suppliers. Says Wadeea Qutub, chief technology officer at Parsons Corp., a Pasadena, Calif., engineering and construction company: "Everyone is talking about XML, but we haven't seen much of it yet."