The haze surrounding web services and the .NET platform finally cleared on February 13 2002, with the launch of Microsoft Visual Studio .NET in 150 cities worldwide.

At the London event, hosted at the Natural History Museum, Microsoft positioned .NET at the centre of the evolution of a universally owned industry ‘ecosystem’, delivering greater functionality to the web.

Costing Microsoft more than NASA spent
putting man on the moon, Microsoft .NET
has been four years in the making and ranks as one of the broadest beta adoptions of a pre-release product ever, with over 3.5 million copies distributed during the past year of beta testing.

Microsoft partners BTI UK, Bank of New York, Nationwide Building Society, KPMG, Accenture and Marks & Spencer, gave glowing testimonials to the .NET platform for web service integration through to legacy transformation and fraud identification applications.

Martin Wilkinson, Profit Protection Manager at Marks & Spencer said, “With Visual Studio .NET we can produce applications that deliver C++ performance, but in Visual Basic timescales”.

Visual Studio .NET and the .NET Framework support more than 20 programming languages, enabling developers to create and deploy XML web services on the .NET Platform which will interoperate between disparate systems. This, combined with a shorter time-to-market resulting from greater developer speed and productivity, indicates that .NET can perhaps deliver on the web’s initial promise. 

More information on Visual Studio .NET:
www.microsoft.com/uk/visualstudio/default.asp

Terrarium
To illustrate the capabilities of the .NET Framework and Visual Studio .NET, Microsoft has launched a UK developer game with a survival of the fittest premise. Players code intelligent creatures, which are subsequently released into the multi-player Terrarium for three weeks. The competition ends on March 6, and the creator of the most dominant creature will win a Microsoft Xbox and a five-day trip to New Orleans to attend Microsoft TechEd. 

To enter, or to check out the leader board:
www.microsoft.com/uk/visualstudio/terrarium