Among developers, Microsoft has long been recognized as a leader in creating full-featured, easy-to-use programming tools. But like most other IDEs, previous versions of Visual Studio have fallen short of delivering a fully integrated environment that maximizes programming efficiency. Visual Studio.Net represents a real breakthrough, enabling developers to employ a single, richly appointed environment to write, test, and debug code regardless of programming language.
This new level of integration stems from the technology underlying .Net itself. All .Net languages compile to Microsoft Intermediate Language (MSIL), so that C# and VB.Net code written for the same purpose, for example, produce virtually identical lines of compiled MSIL code. Before, working with multiple languages--typically Visual Basic 6.0, Visual C++, and Visual InterDev--required that you open multiple development environments within Visual Studio. And of course, you needed a different debugger for each language, so that debugging applications written in multiple languages required you to flip among debugger windows to try and catch errors. Thanks to VS.Net integration and MSIL, a developer can use a single, integrated workspace, with a sole debugger that minimizes previous stability problems incurred by developing multilanguage applications that require simultaneous use of several development tools.
To entice enterprise developers, VS.Net goes further than added stability. Like previous versions, VS.Net contains numerous code-generating wizards to help development projects get off the ground quickly and to automate mundane tasks. However, because enterprise application development demands robust architecture, the Enterprise Architect and Enterprise Developer Editions of VS.Net also include enterprise templates that automate the creation of projects and code that support architectural best practices (see screen). This is a giant step forward: In previous versions of Visual Studio, the examples tended to focus on a single concept, ignoring the importance of architecture.
Application deployment gets a boost as well, with special benefits for development teams. Code for deployment is now packaged in assemblies, with each assembly offering built-in version control along with support for multiple versions of a single DLL on a single machine. This allows developers to work on a specific piece of the application and deploy a new version of a single module while lowering the risk of breaking other referenced code. It also minimizes the problems that arise from shared libraries (otherwise known as "DLL hell").
In large enterprises, where decentralized development teams have diverse requirements, VS.Net offers a substantial productivity boost. Code reuse can occur not just within a single language, but also among various .Net languages--a VB.Net shop and a C# shop, for example, can easily integrate and reuse code. Language syntaxes may be different, but when different languages instantiate and manipulate the same base classes, shorter learning curves result. As developers grow comfortable with a single, unified IDE and its tools, efficiency goes up and training costs go down.
[an error occurred while processing this directive]
