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ORLANDO, Fla.—Microsoft Corp. has commissioned a study showing that its .Net development environment is more productive than comparable Java environments, a top company executive said at the VSLive! Orlando conference here.
Microsoft Developer Division Corporate Vice President Soma Somasegar said Microsoft commissioned The Middleware Co. Inc. to study productivity and performance comparisons between Microsofts Visual Studio .Net 2003 and IBMs WebSphere and other tools, and Microsoft fared significantly better.
For building some enterprise applications, it took developers 195 man-hours with WebSphere, whereas building the same applications using Visual Studio took only 94 man-hours, Somasegar said the study said. Application server installation and configuration took 22 man-hours in the WebSphere environment and only 4 man-hours in the Microsoft environment. Handheld device programming took 16 man-hours with WebSphere and 7 man-hours with Visual Studio. Web application and Web service client programming took 69 man-hours with WebSphere and 40 man-hours with Visual Studio. Web service and Web application host programming took 59 man-hours with IBMs environment and 44 with Microsofts. And systemwide development took 29 man-hours with WebSphere and 2 man-hours with Visual Studio, according to the report, Somasegar said.
Meanwhile, in terms of overall application performance, applications developed in Visual Studio .Net 2003 showed better performance than applications built with IBMs tools, Somasegar said the study showed. Somasegar said applications built using Visual Studio .Net 2003 were able to deliver 635 transactions per second. Similar applications built using a hand-coded WebSphere implementation delivered 482 transactions per second, and applications built using WebSphere Studio Rational Rapid Developer Rational Rapid Developer delivered 365 transactions per second, Somasegar said.
In addition, Somasegar said Microsoft will be delivering changes to its development technology that will enable developers to create applications with 50 percent to 70 percent less code required.
The comparison not only involved productivity and performance, but also cost. According to the study, the Microsoft results are based on a system running Visual Studio .Net running on Windows Server 2003 and costing $19,294. The IBM results are based on a system running WebSphere Network Deployment edition running on Red Hat Linux and costing $253,996.
Somasegar said Microsoft is enjoying an increase in developer momentum toward the .Net platform. Based on internal and external sources, Somasegar said, .Net adoption has grown from 50 percent of Fortune 100 companies saying they use .Net as their primary development environment in July 2002, to 61 percent in July 2003, to 75 percent in July 2004. “That means three out of every four companies are targeting .Net as their primary development platform,” he said.
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But more importantly, Somasegar said, “if you look at the global 100 companies, 90 percent are targeting the .Net platform for the primary development environment.”
Moreover, Somasegar said Forrester Research Inc. did a study asking which platform will be used for the majority of development work in 2004. According to that study, 44 percent of respondents said Java 2 Enterprise Edition (J2EE) and 56 percent said .Net.
Part of the reason might be that Microsoft builds “a family of products that cater to all developers of all different types,” Somasegar said, referring to Mondays announcement of the Visual Studio 2005 Standard Edition, which joins Visual Studio Express, Visual Studio Professional Edition and Visual Studio Team System as upcoming versions of the technology.
However, to succeed overall Microsoft will need partners. “Ive been at Microsoft for 16 years, but at the end of the day a big proponent of our success is the partner ecosystem,” Somasegar said.
As part of its ecosystem, Microsoft has more than 1,000 Most Valuable Professionals (MVPs), 200 partners in its Visual Studio Integration Partners (VSIP) and more than 400 partner products.
“I think of you as an extension of my team,” Somasegar said to the VSLive! Orlando audience, made up largely of Microsoft partners and consultants and corporate developers.
Somasegar vowed to share more builds with outside developers to get feedback on the companys progress. He said the MSDN Feedback Center, code-named LadyBug, has been a big help in the few months since it went live. There have been 3.008 bug reports, with 721 fixed so far, and 2,100 product suggestions, he said.
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