Microsoft Makes Productivity the Issue with Visual Studio.NET

by Dan Burger

Microsoft's side-by-side release of Visual Studio.NET 2003 and Windows Server 2003 is five weeks away. Looking beyond the typically overstated fanfare, this announcement is one of many incremental stages along the .NET pathway. The occasion will be used to draw attention to the growing importance of Web services and its impact on the way applications are developed. Based on industry standard protocols, Web services promises an easier way to share data, primarily by overcoming the obstacles of disparate applications inherent with traditional programming methods.

Visual Studio.NET gives developers a package of tools designed to build applications with an expanding list of programming languages. The tools and the new servers are billed as being better-suited to take advantage of applications that adhere to Web services standards.

Windows Server 2003 marks the first time the .NET Framework is fully integrated into the Windows platform infrastructure.

The capability of building applications in a variety of programming languages and using Web services to deliver those applications is the Microsoft approach to interoperability. This strategy, according to Microsoft, is far better than the Java-centric approach taken by chief rival IBM and its Java 2 Enterprise Edition (J2EE) methodology using the WebSphere platform. The two IT giants are in a struggle to attract developers and thereby gain an advantage in developing Web services.

At a recent developers conference hosted by ASNA, a visual programming and software company based in San Antonio, Texas, that specializes in taking legacy applications to Windows and the Web, Microsoft's Beny Rubenstein covered the highlights of next month's .NET product introduction and the advantages he believes it offers.

At the forefront of this product launch are the productivity gains attributable to Visual Studio.NET 2003, compared with the original, now-one-year-old version of Visual Studio.NET. The gains in productivity come by way of enhancements to the product, rather than through added features.

"Most of our customers have been exposed to J2EE and other platforms, and they are trying to see how well each goes in a pilot project," Rubenstein said. "But it is simply an economical return-on-investment. You look at all the costs. Yes, there is some cost to learn a new technology and to develop some new code. But you also look at how long it takes to do it, how fast you can react to the changes in your business, and how fast can you integrate your customer to your system. When you extrapolate that over five years, it [the .NET Framework] makes sense.

"With Visual Studio, you can accomplish the same tasks with fewer lines of code. There is much less complexity for someone to learn Visual Studio.NET compared to WebSphere. It is much easier to get started."

Rubenstein cited two case studies featuring Allstate Insurance Company and the investment banking company Bear Stearns that support the .NET business proposition. Allstate used Visual Studio.NET to integrate .NET with J2EE and existing mainframe applications, while Bear Stearns deployed a set of XML Web services using Visual Studio.NET and the .NET Framework. (Click here to view the Allstate and Bear Stearns case studies.)

Being able to build applications in the developers' language of choice is a key point in the .NET Framework. For instance, most of the ASNA developers come from an RPG programming background (RPG is a programming language that was developed by IBM for its midrange servers 25 years ago, and it occupies the same spiritual niche as COBOL on mainframes and C++ on Unix.) With RPG, taking green-screen applications to the Web is gaining momentum and the options for getting there include IBM's WebSphere as well as quite a few other options from the ISVs in the OS/400 marketplace.

ASNA's AVR for .NET solution for integrating RPG into .NET (expected to be released in May) is a good example of the type of productivity gains that Microsoft wishes to publicize. With AVR for .NET, RPG programmers continue developing in RPG. That holds great appeal for them, and for companies that have business routines and business logic that need to be retained.

The same is true for programmers who have spent their entire development careers with other .NET supported languages, like COBOL, Visual Basic, C#, and C++.

For these guys, the job is to build applications that talk to systems that they are familiar with and that companies that have invested in. It allows them to save as much code as they can and to exploit their existing skills.

That's not to say .NET does not ramp up the complexity substantially once you get to complex applications where the demands are substantial, but it does start from an asset-base and gives programmers an opportunity to boot-strap themselves up, rather than starting from scratch, which is more likely when switching to the Java requirement of WebSphere.

Rubenstein also notes that .NET provides productivity gains through enterprise templates that allow senior developers and architects to define a framework for viewing applications. "The junior developers can follow these templates," he says. "They define components needed in the application, so that the right choices are made. It provides guidance based on what someone else has learned."

Although programmers write hundreds of programs, they write a finite number of types of programs. The templates define the types of programs they write, and that makes it easier to do complex code. In this way it ramps up productivity.

Roger Pence, ASNA's education director, says a key point to the productivity gains offered by Visual Studio.NET 2003 lies in the fact that you can snap in (the language) you want and get productive with it. This means a programmer can take a familiar language and go to an environment that substantially ramps up productivity, and exploit core competencies. "Do not miss the point of Visual Studio's openness," he says. "With IBM's WebSphere, you have one language [Java]. IBM propels the myth that .NET is a proprietary system. In fact, it is industry-standard stuff. Interoperability boils down to industry standards. There's not a Web service that you publish that can only take a Microsoft client. Anyone can connect to a Web service."

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