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NEW ORLEANS—For Microsoft Corp., the story on its Web services strategy is steady as she goes.
At its TechEd 2002 conference on Wednesday, Microsoft said momentum is strong for its Web services initiatives, with new partners coming on and new technologies being built around its core .Net technology.
In a keynote speech, Eric Rudder, senior vice president of the development platform and evangelism group at Microsoft, said that Visual Studio .Net, Microsofts premier development environment, and the .Net Framework have shipped more than 1 million units to date, emphasizing the growth of customer and partner support.
Rudder said Microsoft devoted four years and millions of hours of development time in bringing these technologies to fruition, and “today were rolling out the next phase,” which includes core standards support and toolkits for the products in the .Net Enterprise Server product line.
For example, to complement Microsofts announcement Tuesday of Commerce Server 2002, Microsoft announced extended XML Web services support through its products. And Rudder announced the availability of the Microsoft SQL Server Windows CE Edition 2.0 beta by the end of this month. The Redmond, Wash., software giant also announced the availability of the SQL Server 2000 Notification Services beta. Notification Services is a scalable platform for developing notification applications based on personalization.
The company also announced the Exchange Server 2000 Server XML Web services toolkit for .Net.
In addition, Microsoft announced its first commercial XML Web service, MapPoint .Net, Rudder said.
Joining Microsoft in its push for Web services ubiquity are partners such as Akamai Technologies Inc., Altova Inc., FrontRange Solutions Inc., Fujitsu, McAfee.com and Symantec Corp.
Meanwhile, Rudder said Microsoft is beefing up its Visual Studio developer support program. He said more than 200 integrated add-on tools and components have been created by component vendors in Microsofts Visual Studio .Net Integration Program.
Rudder said the first key thing for .Net My Services is authentication. He said .Net services support federation and has 200 accounts and performs 3.5 million authentications per month.
“You can do a lot with Web services today, but even more tomorrow,” Rudder said. He said Microsoft is beefing up security, reliability, messaging, business orchestration and transactions.