The world of Web services (according to Microsoft)
Summary
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VS.Net is the most tangible piece of Microsoft's ambitious .Net Framework puzzle. It's the development platform that plays host to a new language--C#--and, in Visual Basic.Net, to a completely renovated version of the company's enormously popular Visual Basic.
But, as the two Erics--Knorr and McGinty--note in our review and analysis of VS.Net, "Microsoft rolls the dice with Visual Studio.Net," it's more than just another IDE. It boasts support for almost two dozen languages including C#, C++, J++, Perl, and Cobol, along with such wildly popular programming dialects as Haskell, Oberon, and Pascal. Toss them all into an integrated debugger and test bed, wizards, and more--and you've got a development platform quite possibly like none other before.
In short, the VSLive! rollout had the spirit of a revival meeting and was enough to make images of classes and methods dance in the heads of the eager coders. But, of course, VS.Net is much more than that. It's Microsoft's stake in the ground--or more accurately, Microsoft's second stake in the ground--in its pursuit of Web services dominance. The company first started to claim its turf in a campaign that started nearly three years ago with an endless stream of rhetoric that effectively turned the concept of Web services into a Microsoft brand.
So, with the Redmond spinmeisters having done an effective job of making Web services seem like yet another Microsoft product, Microsoft now shifts its attention to developers by mounting a full frontal assault on the development community. But this picture isn't really like some great arcing rainbow--it's more like a sandwich, with Microsoft's successful Web services branding on top and VS.Net on the bottom. All that's needed now is the filling--and Microsoft isn't about to let up in its .Net offensive, with the rollout of its .Net Server products just months away.
But will it all be something that enterprises can sink their teeth into? Microsoft's grassroots campaign to win over developers will work for some software vendors--especially those that have partnered with Microsoft in the past--but just how much sway it will have with enterprises is another issue. For many IT shops, the whole idea of Web services is still a whirlwind of high-minded concepts--the stuff of the future that, frankly, a lot of people still can't quite get their arms around.
The common wisdom is that few companies will dust off their legacy code and rewrite those old apps in something like C#--that's just an unrealistic proposition. But many of the geriatric Cobol or Fortran programs that still manage to keep the lights on in the back office can be nudged along into the 21st century by tapping XML to integrate them with new Internet-aware apps.
That's likely to be as far as most companies will dare to dabble in Web services for some time.
Branding may be a good tactic, but it can be too effective--if companies begin to see Web services as strictly an across-the-board Microsoft affair, they may shy away from all the tools, parts, and pieces to avoid getting locked into a single vendor's applications infrastructure. And that's exactly what Web services are not.
Microsoft can reel off some impressive numbers to back up its arguable lead in the Web services race, such as the 3.5 million beta test copies of VS.Net that were distributed prior to the official launch and the company's hefty $5 billion annual R&D budget. And in the face of an upcoming $200 million .Net ad blitz, enterprises must remind themselves that Web services are not synonymous with Microsoft and that getting into the Web services arena doesn't necessarily mean using Microsoft products.
Web services are a logical Internet extension of distributed computing concepts that have been around for years. While Microsoft didn't discover Web services, it's certainly doing its best to make everyone think it did. But Microsoft will have to do a lot more if it hopes to realize the dominant position it has invented for itself. It will have to convince a dubious IT community that its products are secure--and it's not likely that another $200 million in ad bucks will gain that kind of confidence.
Rich Castagna is Tech Update's executive editor.
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