Gates Promises Development Convergence In Visual Studio 2005

Not surprisingly, in his keynote to kick off the VSLive, Avios-SpeechTek and Microsoft Mobile DevCon shows in San Francisco, Gates made no mention of the European Union's decision early Wednesday to fine Microsoft $613 million for having an illegal operating-system monopoly. Instead, he stuck to the regularly scheduled program, making as-expected introductions of another technical preview of the next version of Visual Studio, code-named Whidbey, and Microsoft Speech Server 2004.

Gates said Visual Studio will allow developers to create applications that Web services-enable applications that run on a PC and also leverage Web services to connect back-end applications to a variety of mobile devices. The same tool also will allow developers to speech-enable applications to take advantage of "natural user interfaces."

The new Visual Studio 2005 preview will be distributed Thursday as part of a new developer outreach program that drops community technical previews periodically to give developers the latest available releases of Visual Studio 2005.

Gates said Microsoft's R&D investment to build a next-generation software platform has surpassed that of any company in the industry. "It's bigger than IBM's, but in our case, [we invest it] in just the software environment," he said.

Redmond, Wash.-based Microsoft's investment will help drive forward the opportunity for its vision of seamless computing, where speech, location-based and mobile applications can be developed "using the same tools and languages people are familiar with," he said.

"As you move up new versions of the tool, you just get a more powerful environment," Gates said.

"We've always dreamed about those," Gates said of the potential for making speech another way users can interact with the PC and the telephone. "It's great to see that it's becoming real. All of this creates opportunities for developers, and we're excited to see what each of you can do taking the new tools and platforms to create new applications."

Gates backed up his assertions with demonstrations of new capabilities in Visual Studio 2005 and Speech Server that prove how developers can use one development environment to create applications for various user interfaces.

Richard Irving, Microsoft's program manager for Speech Server, demonstrated how to develop an application in Visual Studio that leverages Speech Server to add a telephony-based speech recognition application to an existing ASP.NET application. Another demo during Gates' keynote showed how developers can use the next version Visual Studio to create applications for the Web, SmartPhone and PocketPC simultaneously.

Perhaps anticipating a lukewarm reception for Speech Server and its ability to speech-enable applications--a capability that has been described as "the Holy Grail" in technology for some time, Gates said--he stressed that there have been major advancements in speech-recognition technology that Microsoft is committed to leveraging.

Microsoft also will ensure that this innovation will be low cost, so it is accessible to the broadest possible base of users, Gates said. "Microsoft is very committed to speech," he said. "It is something that will become more and more mainstream."

In addition to the convergence of application development in Visual Studio 2005, Microsoft's much-ballyhooed grapple with security problems also made it into Gates' talk. In highlighting some of Visual Studio 2005's new features, he said Microsoft has added security features to ward off "people trying to find any exploitable thing in the applications, bring down the Web site or propagate code that does malicious things."

One of the new features is something Microsoft created and used in-house called Prefast, which statically examines code for certain types of characteristics. "This has been so effective [that] we need to get it out [to developers]," Gates said.

Prefast will allow developers to find development patterns in code that might be in error so they can correct them before deploying the application. Microsoft also is extending Prefast so developers can program a broader set of criteria to identify potential problems than Microsoft has preprogrammed into the tool, Gates said.