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Borland Software Corp. Wednesday announced the release of its Together Edition for Microsoft Visual Studio .Net, an integrated design, modeling and coding environment for the Microsoft .Net Framework.
Scotts Valley, Calif.-based Borland made the announcement at the VSLive! Orlando conference in Orlando, Fla., Wednesday during Microsoft Corp.s keynote address. Borland also will provide the first public demonstration of the technology that ties Borlands design and modeling environment to .Net.
Todd Olson, chief scientist for the Together line at Borland, said the company built the product totally in Microsofts C# language for better integration with .Net. “This is our first release going after the .Net platform,” Olson said. “Weve had a lot of history going after Java; now were putting that same emphasis on the .Net world.”
A key feature in the new product is Borland LiveSource, which enables developers to keep models and code synchronized so that changes made to a model are also made to the code. With LiveSource, “the model is your code and your code is the model,” Olson said. Other key features include enhanced patterns support so developers can reuse patterns in developing applications.
“Another main feature area is out documentation support,” Olson said. Together Edition for Microsoft Visual Studio .Net automatically generates documentation, which aids team collaboration in the development process, he said.
Prashant Sridharan, senior product manager for the developer and platform division at Microsoft, said with “.Net getting more and more attraction with mission-critical application development, having a tool like Together lets an architect impose more discipline throughout the entire development process.”
Olson said typically “it has been very difficult to develop using the Unified Modeling Language [UML], and were trying to make it easier.”
With this move into the .Net space with its Together design and modeling tool, Borland is directly taking on IBMs Rational division, which offers its Rational XDE tool for .Net developers. While many have said they expect Rationals support for Microsofts environments to falter following the companys acquisition by IBM, Microsoft says it has not suffered.
“Our relationship with Rational is unchanged,” Sridharan said. “They continue to develop tools for .Net.”
However, Borland officials said they see Rational more likely scaling back its .Net support as the company ties its product line more to IBMs WebSphere and the Eclipse open-source tools platform.
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