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Europe first to get Visual J#.Net

As the throng gathers in Barcelona for Microsoft's Tech Ed developer conference, everyone gets a copy of the Visual J# product
Written by Peter Judge, Contributor

Delegates to Microsoft's Tech Ed conference in Barcelona were the first to get hold of production CDs of Microsoft's Visual J#.Net, a version of the Java language for Microsoft's Visual Studio.Net development environment.

In a keynote that majored on practical applications of Microsoft's .Net framework, Vic Gundotra, general manager of Microsoft's .Net Platform Strategy Group, announced to 5,500 Tech Ed visitors that they could all collect a version after the speech.

Marks & Spencer, said Gundotra, had used .Net for a fraud detection application that alerts security guards by SMS messages, which claimed a 415 percent return on investment in one year. Apparently, the first time it was switched on in a branch, the application immediately launched an alert. To the developer's surprise, it was not a bug, but an actual fraud -- catching this one fraud nearly paid for the SMS integration, claimed Gundotra.

Gundotra's hour-long rallying call for .Net also included a case study from the Bank of New York, whose UK office moved its 'RUFUS for Europe' project, accessed by 6000 people, from Java 2 Enterprise Edition (J2EE) to .Net and C#. Bill Hookings of Bank of New York, who previously presented the same project at the Visual Studio.Net launch in Febuary, said, "We were a Java user, but saw clear benefits in .Net," and stated that, "Java and J2EE would have delivered, but .Net had a number of advantages."

"Previously you had to choose between the rich Windows environment, and the very easy Web environment," said Gundotra. "Visual Studio.Net gives you the best of both worlds."

The Catalan IT minister also made an appearance, to describe his government's efforts to create online access to government services --- a project in which Microsoft is a major partner. "It is essential not just to have all material in the Catalan language, but to routinise the translation into Catalan," he said.


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