Features

SAN FRANCISCO — Microsoft Corp. on Wednesday launched its biggest weapon yet in its battle to dominate the emerging Web services market. 

In a keynote speech before thousands of developers at the VSLive! 2002 Conference, Microsoft’s chief software architect Bill Gates pitched the company’s new Visual Studio.NET as “the most comprehensive development tool of all time.” 

Visual Studio.NET is a bundle of tools Microsoft bills as the cornerstone of its .NET strategy — its vision that one day all business and personal data will be automated and accessible via the Internet. 

Microsoft hopes to encourage people to use its software products and platform to build this massive Web services world. Launching the developer tool kit was the first major milestone. 

Under development for more than four years, the new set of Web tools aims to help developers build Web service applications on the .NET platform. The tools compete with Microsoft’s existing products as well as rival technologies — including Sun Microsystems — that are based on the popular Java programming language. 

While Visual Studio.NET uses Microsoft’s own software programming languages, including a new Java-like language dubbed C (pronounced C-sharp), Microsoft claims the developer product has a key advantage over rivals: It supports 20 programming languages, including Java. That means developers can easily use their existing skills to build Web service applications. 

Gates also touted the tool as highly efficient, noting with a smirk that the product has garnered several awards even before its launch. He presented videos featuring customers, including Loreal and Merrill Lynch, describing how the Visual Studio.NET and .NET framework tools cut down their coding time by 20 percent to 50 percent. 

Momentum is building for the product, Gates said, citing how more than 3.5 million beta test versions already have been distributed. 

The company expects 2 million developers to adopt the technology within the year, which would make it the fastest growing developer tool ever, said Tom Button, Microsoft’s vice president of developer marketing and enterprise tools. 

Analysts so far are impressed with the product and deem it a “credible threat” to Java-based products. 

“It is significantly more advanced and more capable than any of the tools in the Java world,” said John Meyer, senior analyst with the Giga Information Group market research firm. 

Winning the trust of consumers and businesses to rely on Microsoft’s products and services also will be critical, especially as Microsoft works to recover from security holes and flaws found in its other products. 

Gates acknowledged the inherent security challenge for the Web services’ strategy: “We think of all these services as reliable and trustworthy as phones or electricity are today,” he said. “There will be a lot of hard work on the part of Microsoft here.” 

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On the Net: 

http://www.microsoft.com/net