Rupert Goodwins' Diary

Wednesday 13/02/2002

Visual Studio .Net arrives, in a launch of fearsome tedium -- company after company takes to the podium to give the MS approved spiel, and this phase of the launch overruns well into the much more vital tippling and networking section where there may, perhaps, be a story or two to be found.

That story is, perhaps unsurprisingly, whether the multiple companies behind Java 2 Enterprise Edition will hold up against the focus and aggression of Microsoft as it pushes .Net as the Web services saviour. Nobody knows, and while it's easy to take a knee-jerk anti-Microsoft stance it'd be an odd person who felt entirely comfortable supporting Sun to the hilt.

But wait a minute. Aren't both J2EE and .Net supposedly XML based? Therefore, they should work together... and nobody need be locked into either camp. So here's the real story -- anyone dragging their feet over interoperability testing can be easily painted the villain and roundly condemned.

Who's it to be?