Groove, Third Parties Line Up Behind Visual Studio.Net

Groove Networks

The company, which is blazing a trail on peer-to-peer-based collaborative software, said it will adopt Visual Studio.Net as its integrated development environment. Initially, Groove developers will be able to build applications using such tools as Windows Forms, a part of the .Net framework, and use any language supported by .Net. Over time, they will be able to build complete Groove applications without ever leaving the Visual Studio.Net environment, the company said.

Given that Microsoft invested $51 million in Groove last October, it is hardly surprising Microsoft tools got the nod over competitive Java-based offerings, observers said. Groove Chairman Ray Ozzie was on hand last spring as Microsoft Chairman Bill Gates touted the company's HailStorm initiative. HailStorm was the code name for a set of user-centric services to ease e-commerce and Web services.

New Gartner research says the combination of peer-to-peer technologies like Groove's with Web services will be a powerful combination sparking development of a "service station" model of software usage. A service station is a PC or network appliance that publishes individual files and data as Web services using a peer-to-peer architecture, Gartner said. The service station "will do for corporate file sharing what Napster did for music. It will make it easy to get what you want when you want it," said Gartner Group Vice President Daryl Plummer in a prepared statement.

Groove will not be the only ISV on hand Tuesday at the Visual Studio.Net rollout here. Abiliti Solutions, Cape Clear, Xerox and others are also lining up to support the toolset. Even Microsoft archrival Oracle is getting in on the act. Kind of. The company Tuesday posted Windows Developer Center tools on the Oracle Technology Network. Oracle Technology Network members can download the software, which includes the latest version of the Oracle9i database, XML and Web services developer kits, sample code and documentation. Also included is a DBA reference guide for Oracle running in Windows environments.