Update: Microsoft gains Visual Studio .Net momentum

Computerworld - Microsoft Corp. this week is marking the one-year anniversary of its Visual Studio .Net development environment with a flurry of announcements intended to show momentum around its latest tools.
Eric Rudder, senior vice president of developer and platform evangelism at Microsoft, announced this morning during a keynote presentation at the VSLive conference in San Francisco that Borland Software Corp. and AmberPoint Inc. have joined more than 130 industry partners in the company's Visual Studio .Net Integration Program.
Borland's Optimizeit Profiler for the .Net Framework, which was officially announced today, can help developers spot memory leaks and other potential problems that can hinder application performance, said George Paolini, a general manager at Borland.
The Scotts Valley, Calif.-based tools vendor acquired the Optimizeit technology last year from San Jose-based Redline Software Inc., better known as VMGear.

AmberPoint and Microsoft announced plans to jointly build tools to help users manage distributed applications based on the .Net Framework. The product is due in the second half of the year, and pricing has not been announced. Oakland, Calif.-based AmberPoint specializes in Web services management tools.

Microsoft and AmberPoint are also working together on the integration of AmberPoint's products with Microsoft's management software, such as Microsoft Operations Manager.

Another small vendor introducing a new product at the VSLive conference was Sanctum Inc. Santa Clara, Calif.-based Sanctum's AppScan Developer Edition will integrate into Visual Studio .Net 2003, which is due for general release in April. AppScan, which will sell for $995, tests for security defects in code, provides descriptions of the problems and suggests fixes.
The level of interest in .Net-focused tools remains to be seen, since many Microsoft developers are just starting to switch to the new development environment.
Brian Siler, a lead programmer analyst at Hilton Hotels Corp. in Memphis, said his development group is about to enter the coding phase for its first .Net project. "The initial skepticism toward [Visual Basic] .Net is fading as we start to see how some of the new language features will make our tasks easier," he said.
But a major concern is how to get the .Net Framework out to the company 's geographically dispersed end users. Since they're running Windows 2000 or XP with nonadministrative access, they can't install the framework on their own, Siler explained.

Microsoft's Rudder today spotlighted several early adopters of .Net technology, including Bear Stearns & Co. and Danske Bank. New York-based Bear Stearns built a set of Web services to let its developers gain access to stock-order-processing functionality on an IBM AS/400