Visual Studio 2005 a creative departure for Microsoft?

As Jim Fawcette who had had this interesting entry writes, we’re starting to see Microsoft’s strategy for serving different market sectors with the preview of Visual Studio Team System (VSTS), the enterprise version of VS 2005 and the various Visual Studio Express (VSE) Editions.

What hasn’t been discussed widely yet is that Microsoft’s approach is fundamentally different from what we’ve seen for development tools. Historically, design focuses on the high-end tool, then all other versions are essentially crippled versions of the “real” release, with levels of features simply turned off with little or no attention being paid to the unique needs of each market sector. From what Microsoft has shown us so far, the Whidbey release will be a welcome change with each version specifically designed to meet the needs of its target user.

At the high end, VSTS adds modelling and integrated version control. Modelling was anticipated since IBM acquired Rational. Microsoft in turn rejected UML, essentially sneering at its limitations, and chose Whitehorse which might seem risky, but in the short term it probably isn’t. VSTS might do its job, simply by showing Microsoft’s commitment to high-end enterprise needs. Today only 6 percent of developers actually use modelling. Virtually simultaneously, Microsoft announced a marketing partnership with Borland, which is selling its product Together . This aggressive push could cause significant problems for IBM-Rational, or perhaps Borland will expose many more developers to model-driven design.

On the competitive landscape front to take advantage of Microsoft’s weakness in the Visual Studio transition to .NET and then Longhorn, both BEA and Sun have designed tools to appeal to the VB class of developers. Yet WebLogic Workshop and Java Studio Creator take subtly different approaches to the job of bringing Java to a new class of business users. Workshop is architected around a role-based vision, where the IDE presented is tied to the type of developer logging into the system. Front-end, Web-based developers see one set of tools, business workflow analysts another, and enterprise coders a third. Sun’s Java Studio Creator, on the other hand, caters to the first two audiences, leaving the resulting apps to be moved into Java Studio Enterprise for the third. Oracle has enhanced JDeveloper with support for drag-and-drop and dev-friendly Struts, with JavaServer Faces on the horizon, but like Eclipse, the product is still targeted at the enterprise developer. Plus JDeveloper apps run without porting on WebLogic and JBoss. Borland’s JBuilder remains the market leader, but Workshop’s open source play and the possibility that Sun will use its aggressive licensing strategy to build developer share with the VB-like Java Studio Creator leave Borland little room to lower price and make it up on hardware or app server sales. Java Creator is a needed response to IT’s inability to find enough highly skilled J2EE developers. But in that, it is essentially a move to replicate the RAD facilities of today’s Visual Studio .NET, not to break new ground. That’s not necessarily bad—just less ambitious—but it addresses key needs of corporate customers, particularly workflow analysts and enterprise coders. Sun is also embracing UML, by integrating Embarcadero Technologies’ Describe UML 6.1 standards-based modelling technology with its higher-end Sun Java Studio Enterprise. It is claimed that the new module will support all phases of the development lifecycle, from reverse engineering and documentation of code, to user interaction and process modelling, on through to code generation and deployment of applications.

Of the low-end editions from Microsoft, the most intriguing is Visual Web Developer 2005 Express, which seems to be tackling the sector that NetObjects Fusion staked out circa five years ago. Fusion was exciting and head-and-shoulders better than its competitors, but never found a large enough market to stay alive. Eventually, Fusion was acquired by IBM, which bundled it for a while then quietly sent it to the software graveyard.

VB 2005 Express uses wizards and other visual aids to help entry-level developers, described by Microsoft as “hobbyists”. While this fills a gap, it isn’t clear if any of the versions address the majority of business-centric developers who made Visual Basic 2 through 4 so successful. From what we’ve seen so far, that group might still fall in a gap between Express and Team System. Efforts such as MyClasses target them, but do they really need or want to build managed code optimised for large-scale distributed applications?

Microsoft is promising even more advances to built on the technical foundation in addition to all the tools, wizards, etc. Eric Rudder who heads up Microsoft’s server and tools business said at VSLive:

To make any application more secure, there will be some static-analysis tools, something called PreFAST, which will scan your code and look for things like buffer overruns or security patterns or detections. We have some easier ways to test your code in different environments. We have something called RANU, run as normal user, where you have ways to launch your application in different browsers or security zones or contexts.

We have some new compiler technology which we call SlashGSFlag. It’s an option you set in your compiler that makes it harder for people to look at your code and do buffer overruns. You’ll see some of the technology in Windows XP Service Pack 2 be very complementary. Some of that technology actually uses SlashGS. You’ll see support for NX [nonexecute] chips certificates from the AMD and Intel chips. You’ll see support for nonexecute so in areas where people are actually able to modify code, those features will actually be marked as nonmodifiable, execute-only. We’ve announced support for corporate error reporting so that developers can take their applications that are in development, put up a corporate error reporting server and capture their logs or errors. It’s the exact technology we use at Microsoft that is sometimes called “Watson.” If you’ve ever seen an Office app and some [error] happened and it asks if you would like to report it. Developers can now enable their own applications to write to their own logs.

If the segmented editions work as planned, Visual Studio should expand .NET’s adoption, described by Microsoft in May as: 80 million desktops with the .NET Framework installed, 64 of the Fortune 100 deploying “major” applications on .NET, and 2.5 million copies of Visual Studio .NET in use; 185 Premier VSIP partners, and 13,000 affiliate partners. Time will tell.

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