NEW YORK—Microsoft Corp. kicked off its 30-city DevDays tour here on Monday with a demonstration of the “Whitehorse” modeling tools that it plans to integrate into the next version of its Visual Studio tool suite.
Whitehorse is just one of a number of new features that Microsoft is planning on including in its Visual Studio “Whidbey” release that is due out by the end of calendar 2004. Microsoft has said it also will include an updated version of its .Net Compact Framework; a revised version of its ASP.Net development environment; and support for new features in the languages that compose its developer environment.
Read “Whats On Tap for Whidbey?”
Whidbey is currently in alpha test. Developers are expecting the first full-fledged beta to launch in June.
But Whidbey wasnt the only product that Microsoft executives and other invited speakers put through its paces before a packed house of several hundred developers in New York. The speakers also showed off BizTalk 2004, Microsofts forthcoming update to its integration server, which the company has said will launch on March 2; InfoPath 2003, Microsofts e-forms tool; SQL Server 2000 Reporting Services; and Visual Studio Tools for Office 2003.
Andrew Brust, president of Progressive Systems Consulting and a Microsoft regional director, emphasized in the morning DevDays keynote address that Microsoft is making its Visual Studio environment a more tightly integrated element of a growing number of its core products.
The mornings other keynote presenter—Stephen Forte, chief technology officer and cofounder of Corzen Inc., a financial services consulting firm—demonstrated the alpha version of Whitehorse.
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