News

Microsoft Advances .NET Platform with Several Releases

At the Microsoft Professional Developers Conference (PDC) in Orlando, Fla., Microsoft Corp. released technology previews and beta releases of its family of .NET enterprise servers, as well as Microsoft .NET Framework and Visual Studio development tools.

The Microsoft (www.microsoft.com) .NET Framework and Visual Studio.NET fall under the umbrella environment of the Microsoft .NET Platform. The .NET Framework is a high-productivity, multi-lingual development and execution environment for building and running Web services with features such as cross-language inheritance and debugging. The .NET Framework simplifies the creation of Web services by automatically handling many programming tasks, regardless of language, reducing the amount of code developers must write and eliminating common sources of programming errors.

Visual Studio.NET is another tool set for developers building Web services on the .NET platform. Visual Studio.NET includes updates to the Visual Basic and Visual C++ development environments, the Visual FoxPro database development system, and the new language C#.

Microsoft also announced the preliminary versions of two core specifications for creating and using Web services, adding to the SOAP group of XML interoperability technologies.

The two specifications are SOAP Contract Language (SCL), which describes the capabilities of Web services, and SOAP Discovery, which provides rules for locating Web services.

The new SCL specification builds on SOAP to provide a mechanism to help developers describe the features of a Web service using XML. Developers will be able to use SCL to provide other developers and development tools with a description of the messages a Web service is expecting to send and receive.

The SOAP Discovery specification provides a set of rules for locating the SCL description of a Web service automatically - in other words, it enables an SCL description to be automatically discovered.

In addition to the new development tools and SOAP specifications, Microsoft announced strategic partnerships with 70 ISVs, 17 tools vendors, ten systems integrators and solutions providers, and four publishers to support the .NET Framework and Visual Studio.NET. - Isaac Slepner

About the Author

Scott Bekker is editor in chief of Redmond Channel Partner magazine.

Featured

  • The Era of Windows 10 (and Some Office and Skype Editions) Officially Comes to an End

    Microsoft has formally withdrawn support for Windows 10 as of Oct. 14, 2025, bringing the curtain down on one of its most widely adopted operating systems.

  • Microsoft Adds Direct Copilot Integration to Microsoft 365

    Microsoft is integrating its Copilot AI into the core Office apps -- Word, Excel, PowerPoint, Outlook and OneNote -- rather than offering it as a separate add-on.

  • Microsoft Appoints Althoff as New CEO for Commercial Business

    Microsoft CEO and chairman Satya Nadella on Wednesday announced the promotion of Judson Althoff to CEO of the company's commercial business, presenting the move as a response to the dramatic industrywide shifts caused by AI.

  • Broadcom Revamps VMware Partner Program Again

    Broadcom recently announced a significant update regarding its VMware Cloud Service Provider (VCSP) program, coinciding with the release of VMware Cloud Foundation (VCF) 9.0, a key component in Broadcom’s private cloud strategy.

Most   Popular