Visual Studio.Net To Be Linked To Service Providers, Passport And UDDI

The .Net development platform, for example, will feature a tab in the start page with direct links to many hosting companies that can host .Net applications developed on the platform, said David Lazar, group product manager for Visual Studio.Net. He noted Microsoft is working with Unisys and others on the service, which will enable developers to quickly choose a hosting company and deploy the application to the hoster from within the platform.

"One of the key target audiences has been hosters because with Visual Studio 6.0 we had a lot of pushback from hosters who said it was hard to host, and we did the architecture to make it easier to deploy," Lazar said. "Developers can go to the tool, build an application or service, hit the tab in the Start Page, and it'll give you a list of all hosters and 30 days of free hosting for applications."

Additionally, Microsoft is hard at work on a toolkit to enable integration of the development platform with .Net services such as Passport, which could provide users and developers with automatic authentication to applications and Web servers, Lazar said.

"We're working on a toolkit to enable Passport integration but we're doing R and D," Lazar said. 'It would enable developers to get authentication for free."

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Microsoft's .Net toolset will also be integrated with the Internet-based UDDI .Net service to give developers and users instant access to thousands of Web services posted to the directory. "This would enable developers to get authentication for free," he said, adding Microsoft could maintain a list of names that would have access to a specific application or Web service. "Developers can publish to UDDI and look up in UDDI to get a list of Web services offered."

Microsoft will also offer a Web reference page so developers can search UDDI listings, Lazar added.

As first reported by CRN in October, Visual Studio.Net will be launched on Feb. 13 by company Chairman Bill Gates at the VSLive! Conference in San Francisco. The development platform allows developers to easily drag and drop and create .Net applications and XML Web services on the Internet and for Microsoft clients, .Net services and forthcoming .Net MyServices platform, due to launch midyear.

One leading Microsoft consulting firm in New York has been beta-testing the platform for more than a year and has already moved to the platform, which has been released to MSDN subscribers.

"We're becoming an almost 100 percent .Net shop already, but we're a special case," said Andrew Brust, president of Progressive Systems. "However, I see a lot of adoption taking place this year, though it will take a good year or two before most MS shops have completely switched over. Developing XML Web Services using the .Net languages, Framework and Visual Studio.Net can be done totally independently of .Net MyServices or the .Net Enterprise Servers. It's unclear to me right now to what extent developers will want to use .Net MyServices. The .Net Enterprise Servers, most importantly SQL Server, are and will be very popular."

Meanwhile, open-source vendor Ximian continues development on a Linux implementation of the key components of Visual Studio.Net. Ximian expects to have a working version available this summer, but the finished product isn't expected until early 2003, said a spokeswoman for the Boston-based open-source Linux desktop company.

Ximian, which announced the plan last July, plans to engineer an open-source and commercial version of the Visual Studio.net toolset based on the C#, CLI (Common Language Infrastructure) and .Net framework code submitted by Microsoft to the international standards body ECMA.

The open-source desktop company in January announced a change in licensing by the Mono Project. With this change, the class libraries produced by Mono, an open-source community initiative to deliver a Linux- and Unix-compatible version of the Microsoft .Net development framework, will be released under the X11 software license, rather than the GNU General Public License (GPL). Under the open-source X11 license, corporate contributors to the project will be entitled to build Mono-based products without the constraint of publishing final source code.