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"When we ask people what they want in their tool, they say integration," LaPlante said. "Rather than best-of-breed they say they want integration across the tool. … So integration is a critical aspect of aligning everyone on the team to make sure were going in the right direction and going to get there at the same time." "The user interface layer, more than any other aspect of the application, is where we see the most evolution," Gartners Driver said. Infragistics Guida said, "Buy versus build is always being considered by development teams, and the presentation layer is the greatest place you can benefit by buying" versus writing code from scratch. "Its almost a no-brainer with the state of the IDEs [integrated development environments] out there." Brad McCabe, chief technology evangelist at Infragistics, said Microsofts move simply indicates the maturing of the industry and also puts presentation layer and user interface development on the same level with other development components such as modeling and testing. "Theyre all important, but theyre all important in different ways," McCabe said. "Developers could always go out and pick up Mercury [Interactive Inc.] for testing or Rational for requirements, and do all the things you were taught to do as a developer, but now Microsoft brings that out and puts it in the forefront for them," McCabe said. "It makes the .Net framework and the .Net environment far more productive. It brings development full circle for anybody from the hobbyist up to mission-critical, 24-by-7 data center application developers." Check out eWEEK.coms Developer & Web Services Center at http://developer.eweek.com for the latest news, reviews and analysis in programming environments and developer tools.

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