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.NET Toolkits Released for SQL, BizTalk

Along with the formal launch of Visual Studio .NET on Wednesday, Microsoft issued two toolkits to help developers build XML Web services using SQL Server and BizTalk Server.

The SQL Server and BizTalk toolkits join an existing toolkit for Exchange 2000 Server and tools in development for Commerce Server 2002, which is currently in beta.

Barry Goffe, group product manager for Microsoft's .NET Enterprise Servers, says that the Visual Studio .NET tools and the .NET Framework's runtime are the big step forward for the programming model.

"But when people build applications they're going to build apps on the enterprise servers," Goffe says. "The last year and a half, since we introduced the enterprise servers, we've been spending a lot of time adding technologies to the servers and integrating them with Visual Studio .NET."

Microsoft began talking about the SQL toolkit back in December. Wednesday's announcement gives the tool a formal name and confirms that it will be a free download for SQL Server 2000 licenseholders.

Called the SQL Server 2000 Web Services Toolkit for Microsoft .NET, that toolkit is designed to help developers quickly build XML Web services on SQL Server 2000. But it is also supposed to let developers build Web services incrementally by turning SQL Server stored procedures or server-side XML templates into Web services.

The tool can be downloaded at href="http://www.microsoft.com/sql/webservices.

The BizTalk Server 2002 Web Services Toolkit for Microsoft .NET was also released as part of BizTalk Server 2002, which became available last week.

The toolkit integrates with Visual Studio to allow developers to use BizTalk Server components in the Visual Studio .NET development environment or turn BizTalk Server business processes into XML Web services.

The BizTalk toolkit can be downloaded here.

About the Author

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

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