News

ActiveState Brings Perl to Visual Studio.NET

• By Scott Bekker
• December 14, 2000

ActiveState Tool Corp. has bridged one of the gaps between Linux and Windows 2000 with the beta release of Visual Perl, a plug-in for Microsoft’s Visual Studio.NET that offers a full-featured, integrated development environment for Perl.

Visual Perl’s GUI-based environment contains all the standard features of a modern IDE, such as a rich syntax-aware editor, method tips, online help, and debugger support. Visual Perl also features a syntax-based colorized editor for instant feedback as code is written; code completion assistance such as method tips and call tips that save the programmer from extra use of documentation; online documentation; the ability to run programs in a debugger or in the shell; automatic highlights of syntax errors as they are introduced; and linking of error messages in a task list to the error source.

Perl is a widely used programming language, largely used in Web development, and usually developed in a Linux or Unix environment.

Visual Studio.NET provides enabling technologies to simplify the creation, deployment, and ongoing evolution of secure, scalable Web applications and Web services. These include shared editors for use in all Visual Studio languages, Web and Windows forms, and XML-based Web services. – Isaac Slepner