By Roberta Holland, eWEEK
March 7, 2001 11:26 AM ET


In an effort to seed the developer community for its .Net strategy, Microsoft Corp. this week announced plans for a Visual Studio.Net Open Tools Platform.

Company officials say the platform will provide more extensibility and greater customization that the current version of Visual Studio allows.

The platform, which is expected to be available in the second half of the year, consists of Visual Studio.Net, the previously announced Visual Studio for Applications software developers kit and the Visual Studio Integration SDK.

The goal "is to provide a way for developers to extend their tools and make them more powerful," said Robert Green, Visual Studio lead product manager, in Redmond, Wash.

Keeping it simple

The new platform will help users customize their development environments and provide an easier way for them to create wizards and add-ins to handle complex tasks, Green said.

"We've opened up the tool for vendors, language vendors and tool vendors to deeply integrate into Visual Studio.Net," Green said. Vendors don't have to write their own editors or debuggers with the Open Tools Platform.

Microsoft hopes the platform will attract developers by offering more integrated tool sets, while attracting vendors by promising a broader appeal among Visual Studio developers.

Right now, licensees of the Visual Studio Integration Program, which includes language and tool vendors, are using the platform to move their own technology to the .Net platform. Microsoft has not disclosed the financial terms of the licensing program.

Data Dynamics Ltd., a licensee, is using the platform to take two of its products into the .Net environment. Its ActiveBar is an ActiveX control that lets developers add Windows menus and toolbars to their applications. ActiveReports, meanwhile, allows Visual Basic programmers to add reporting capabilities to their applications.

"We've tailored many of our products to the Microsoft platform, and to the extent our customers are going to move to .Net, we certainly want to have the products they'll need," said Tim Moffatt, president of Data Dynamics, in Columbus, Ohio.