.Net Tools, Technologies To Be Touted At TechEd

Microsoft

Microsoft will try to stress that Web services are real now, and not just a pipe dream of vendors looking to sell more products. The company also wants to show its .Net game plan is a better way to build and deploy these services compared with the rival J2EE strategy espoused by Sun Microsystems, IBM and others, said Microsoft partners.

The end game for Microsoft is a wave of enterprise-class "federated" Web services (related story) and the tools with which to build them. But it must also counter a perception that its .Net vision is more hype than reality.

Compuware will preview a version of its application performance monitoring software for Windows.Net. With Vantage 8, integrators will be able to quickly monitor .Net servers for availability and performance, said Gery Plourde, product sales director for the Farmington Hills, Mich., software developer.

Vantage 8, a suite of monitoring and troubleshooting products slated to ship in April, will support Windows.Net when that new operating system becomes available later this year, the company said. It includes templates to get management and monitoring services up and running quickly for Back Office, Site Server, BizTalk Server and other related applications. Pricing starts at $800 per server.

Actional, Mountain View, Calif., will demonstrate SoapSwitch, a Web services gateway that will help corporations or integrators supporting them make existing back-end enterprise applications available for use in the .Net environment, said James Phillips, vice president of product management. Actional, which made its name providing adapters for tying together diverse enterprise applications, is relying on its knowledge of back-end application vendors such as SAP and PeopleSoft to make this happen. "We get at and interact with those systems in native and proprietary ways, then turn around and offer up that [data for use in Web services," he said. The software is priced per CPU with an average enterprise price tag of about $200,000. SoapSwitch also supports the rival J2EE environment.

NEC Computers will show off an enhanced fault-tolerant server optimized for .Net with Gigabit Ethernet connections and up to 210 Gbytes of storage. The servers start at $17,000, about one-tenth the price of comparable Tandem or Compaq machines, according to Mike Mitsch, director of server technologies for the Boxborough, Mass., company.

Mitsch said fail-over is a higher-availability, less-complex solution than clustering. "A good example is Sharepoint Portal Server. There's a tremendous opportunity for VARs to do integration [with portal work and portals need to be continuously available; rebooting is not an option," he noted. "Failover requires running one copy of the operating system on two machines in lockstep, so there is instant failover. With clustering, you're always in recovery mode," he said.

If a cluster goes down, even in the best-case scenario, for a few seconds the company has lost those few seconds of data, which can be a huge deal in transaction environments, NEC said.

Interactive Software Engineering (ISE) will show off EiffelStudio for VS.Net, a development environment for that Microsoft toolset. ISE is porting its Eiffel programming language, which supports multiple inheritance, to Visual Studio.Net. Eiffel, unlike Java or C, also sports a design-by-contract feature, which developers use to set up rules in advance for their projects to ensure generations of cleaner software, the company said.