Visual Studio .Net/BizTalk Combo May Tame Web

Microsoft Corp.'s Visual Studio .Net, making its formal debut this week, is a good news/bad news proposition for app developers.

Microsoft Corp.s Visual Studio .Net, making its formal debut this week, is a good news/bad news proposition for app developers.

The good news, as well discuss in a review next week, is that Visual Studio .Net provides impressively transparent facilities for creating and deploying Web services. Even better are the new language-level facilities—such as structured exception handling in Visual Basic .Net and the new security APIs in .Net Framework—that enable developers to write more-robust code.

The bad news is that developers who make the Web their application platform will need all the help they can get to deal with the Webs uncoupled (and often uncertain) behaviors. Microsoft hopes that BizTalk Server, with its facilities such as BizTalk Orchestration, will become the trusted ally of developers facing the challenge of achieving transaction integrity, maximizing process concurrency and interfacing with Component Object Model-based apps that arent yet part of the XML-delimited world.

Making life easy for developers has always been Microsofts most effective strategy. Just as the productivity of Visual Basic made Windows the logical target platform for desktop GUI development, BizTalk Server and Visual Studio .Net could combine to give the Windows platform irresistible appeal to developers facing the climb up an arduous Web services learning curve.