August 14, 2000

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Web Development Platforms
Stealing Java's Thunder

continued...page 3 of 3

More on Visual Studio:

sidebar: Microsoft's C# Likely Signals The Death Knell For Visual J++ sidebar: Avoid Recoding Hassles: Prepare Now For A .Net World SOAP Lets Web Apps Talk Across Firewalls (7/17/00) TechWeb Wooing Developers Is Key To Microsoft.NET (6/22/00)

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All the Visual Studio languages will have the same tools for debugging, ferreting out bottlenecks, and reusing code. This means less training will be required, and it will be easier for a developer to transfer skills learned with one tool to another in the suite.

Each of the development tools will have some significant new features, but some tools will be getting more attention from Microsoft than others.

The big news is that Visual Basic will finally become a fully object-oriented programming language. It will go far beyond the rudimentary object-oriented features of VB 6.0, which should make it much more compelling for enterprise development.

It's uncertain whether all of the complexities of an object-oriented language are warranted in a development tool positioned as being reasonably easy to learn and highly productive, but many professional programmers will welcome the additions.

Visual Basic is also receiving upgrades in many other areas. Microsoft says these are to simplify development, but, like the object-oriented features, will make it a far more complex tool.

The next version will allow free threading, as well as allow code to spawn new Windows threads. It will support structured exceptional handling similar to C++ that will finally eliminate the need for all those On Error Goto statements. Variables can also be initialized on the same line where they are declared, similar to how constants work.

Another major change in Visual Basic is support for type safety, eliminating at last what's sometimes derisively known as Evil Type Coercion, where VB changes the type of data to force-fit it to the code that's executing, if it can. The Option Strict statement will control this behavior in each code module, turning off the built-in type coercion.

The changes in Visual C++ are enhancements to ATL, the Active Template Library. ATL Server is a set of classes that support the creation of Web Services, accessing the full functionality of IIS through the low-level Internet Services API.

These classes are designed to improve code performance while speeding development. Calling a Web Service from a C++ client will be as simple as creating a new instance of the Web Service class and calling the methods it exposes.

The ATL server architecture uses an Internet Server API DLL to create Web Services with a low-level interface to services built into IIS Source (see diagram, above).

There will also be a common set of libraries that will include a set of services that are shared by Visual Basic and Visual C++.

The other development products in Visual Studio are likely to have at least incremental enhancements as well, but none have yet been announced. With all the Web support in the other products, it will be interesting to see what fate holds for Visual InterDev.

Because Web Services and Web Forms are so tightly integrated with ASP+, rumor has it that Visual InterDev will disappear, its Web development and management features folded into the other tools.

Microsoft faces a huge task meeting its Visual Studio.net promises, making it the development platform of choice for distributed Web applications, while continuing to support desktop development as well.

Don Kiely is software technologist for Third Sector Technologies in Fairbanks, Alaska. He can be reached at donkiely@computer.org

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Illustration by David Goldin

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