VS .Net Makes Compelling Gains

The most powerful synergy in Microsoft Corp.'s technology portfolio is between its powerful platform services and its reasonably priced, highly capable tools. Wooing developers with seductive ease of use, Microsoft's tools then pave a path of least resistance toward the adoption of each new wave of Windows features.

Visual Studio .Net 2003, slated for release the same week as Microsoft Server 2003, walks hand-in-hand with that platform to help buyers discover its benefits for distributed service deployment.

eWEEK Labs was more impressed, though, with the ways the new tools expand the charter of enterprise development beyond the PC/server platform. The Visual Studio .Net 2003 upgrade, which we reviewed in its final pre-release state, revealed useful and convenient new handheld-device capabilities and polished the previous version's rough edges.

(Take a walk-through of Visual Studio .Net 2003 with eWEEK Labs.)

Developers need not fear an intimidating learning curve like the one they faced last year: The fairly short 15-month upgrade interval between Visual Studio .Net 2002 and 2003 is consistent with the evolutionary feel of the new release. Even Microsoft offers a modest measure of the step, rather than leap, that the company is taking with this version: Developers using any edition of the 2002 tools can upgrade to the corresponding edition of 2003 for only $29, as long as they do it before the end of September.

Visual Studio .Net 2003 is offered in three editions: Professional (which we tested), Enterprise Developer and Enterprise Architect. Owners of other Microsoft and competing development tools from BEA Systems Inc., Borland Software Corp., IBM, Metrowerks Inc., Oracle Corp., Webgain Inc. and others can upgrade for a discount.

Sale prices for the various editions are the same as they were last year: Professional Edition opens the bidding at $1,079 (upgrade $549), while Enterprise Developer raises the stakes to $1,799 (upgrade $1,079); Enterprise Architect heads the list at $2,499 (upgrade $1,799). Single-language Standard editions for Visual Basic, C#, C++ and Java-based J# remain at $109.

The entry-level Professional edition will be adequate for many independent developers' needs. It covers the expanded Web services ground that Microsoft carved out last year, exposing any component as an XML Web service merely by including the WebMethod attribute. Developers who have never explored Web services territory will be astonished to discover that scripted demonstrations, for once, don't exaggerate the ease with which this can be done.

Support for new Web services standards, including WS-Attachments, WS-Routing, and WS-Security, is promised in this release. However, it will be a challenge for developers to use facilities like the service discovery mechanisms in .Net Server 2003 to create a viable marketplace (or at least a meeting place) for services outside individual enterprise boundaries. In this respect, technology is years ahead of practice, and the gap is not closing quickly.

The .Net 2003 tools further extend the scope of basic application development to include device-aware applications that adapt to form factors other than the standard full-screen desktop or notebook PC. After years of working with clumsy cross-platform libraries that never quite manage to span the gaps, we're more than pleased to see this step-up in development capability.

It's no surprise, though, that the list of supported device types is a catalog of Microsoft initiatives: Pocket PC, Pocket PC Phone Edition, and any other platforms that might emerge with support for the .Net Compact Framework. Making a valiant effort to keep our cynicism in check, we sincerely compliment Microsoft's tool-smiths on their success in integrating Pocket PC development and testing into the Visual Studio environment.

Having been on the receiving end of months of buildup for this aspect of the 2003 tool set, we decided to give it a worst-case test by installing the tools and simply diving in to build a Pocket PC application without the slightest reference to documentation or tutorials. We were impressed to find ourselves, literally minutes later, testing a Pocket PC application on the included emulator software.

Developers may be understandably nervous about using their own Pocket PCs as testbeds, and Microsoft has anticipated this concern. Buyers who register their purchase of Visual Studio .Net 2003 before June 30 will receive a ViewSonic Corp. V37 Pocket PC, subject to available supply.

All of the 2003 editions of Visual Studio also include the Visual Basic Upgrade Wizard that migrates applications from Visual Basic 6.0 to Visual Basic .Net. For the first time, this migration aid is also included in the VB-only Standard edition: We suspect that Microsoft desperately desires to purge the developer community of all those VB6 legacy habits and expectations.

There's no question that Visual Basic .Net is a superior language, with its full object-oriented inheritance mechanisms and much improved error handling (vital for network applications whose resource availability may come and go).

The improved migration tools in the 2003 package assist with User Controls and Web Classes, which were previously unaddressed, but even Microsoft only claims "up to 95 percent" automatic migration: Developers know what that last 5 percent can mean to cost and schedule.

Speaking of numbers that fall slightly short of 100 percent, Microsoft claims the 2003 release of Visual C++ offers "98 percent conformance" with the ISO C++ standard. We leave it to developers to evaluate the importance, outside of a computer science classroom, of the 2003 compiler's new support for Partial Template Specialization and Partial Ordering of Function Templates. As Kernighan and Plauger famously asked: If you're as clever as you can be when you write your code, how will you ever debug it? Additional buffer-overflow prevention diagnostics, along with compiler diagnostics that reference source file locations rather than template library locations, will probably be of more practical everyday value.

The initial release of the Visual Studio .Net tools included awkward opportunities for confusion—as, for example, when a change to one view of a project was not reflected in other views. Visual Studio .Net 2003 showed improvement in this area: We found it more difficult to produce such inconsistencies in the 2003 tool set, and those inconsistencies were easier to resolve.

Tools such as the graphical XML editor have also been strengthened, now offering more useful views of complex schema that overwhelmed last year's version.

Visual Studio .Net 2003 is still not the one best-integrated development environment for all enterprise needs. To state the obvious, it's only hosted on Windows, unlike the Linux and Mac OS X offerings available from Borland, Metrowerks and others. The .Net Common Language Runtime is certainly a safer place to run with scissors than the Microsoft run-time environments of years past, but the Java platform has also been maturing and enjoys deep-pocketed support from IBM and other enterprise kingmakers.

Developers writing the massive amounts of code in embedded devices and low-level system software will find powerful organizational aids in tools like Source Dynamics' Source Insight and SlickEdit's Visual SlickEdit programmers' editors. But for developers targeting Windows on the server, on the PC client, or under Microsoft's widening umbrella of other types of devices, Visual Studio .Net 2003 does more and annoys us less than any previous version.

And as Microsoft has often shown, consistent improvement from one year to the next is often more important than where you start.

Technology Editor Peter Coffee can be reached at peter_coffee@ziffdavis.com.

Executive Summary: Visual Studio .Net 2003

Usability Excellent Capability Excellent Performance Good Interoperability Good Manageability Good Scalability Good Security Good

Microsoft's Visual Studio .Net 2003 is an evolutionary update that integrates Pocket PC application development under the broad umbrella of PC client, server and Web services code creation that Microsoft unveiled last year. The environment's tools are better polished than last year's versions, although they're still neither bulletproof nor especially suited to low-level system code—and certainly not to projects aimed at anything but Microsoft platforms. More information is available at www.microsoft.com/visualstudio.

(+) Incorporates handheld device development into unified development model and tool set; addresses developer concerns with Visual Basic migration to .Net model and improves core C++ technology; refines behavior and improves robustness of tools in general compared with prior release.

(-) Remains focused on Microsoft platforms; still poses adoption challenges for developers using legacy Microsoft tools.

EVALUATION SHORT LISTBorland's DelphiJBuilderKylixIBM's WebSphere Studio

Copyright © 2004 Ziff Davis Media Inc. All Rights Reserved. Originally appearing in Dev Source.