The second half of The Framework is Visual Studio .NET. Microsoft has been very successful with Visual Studio, its integrated development environment. Visual Studio .NET contains such a laundry list of features that they cannot be even listed here. Principally, it is the environment that architects and developers will use to plan and develop databases, web applications, web services, client/ server applications, n-tier systems and more. The Enterprise Architect version even includes a UML-like language for designing business processes and a full feature version of BizTalk server.

Among the other new products in Visual Studio .NET is C#. C# is a very Java-like language in structure and syntax. Of course, Java is similar to C++, which is similar to C and so on. Another language due out soon is J# (J sharp). J# is going to be the Visual Studio product for developing in Java. It will be interesting to see if this leads to legal action on the part of Sun. When J# comes out, I will write some applications and post the source code in Java, J#, J++, C++ and C# just to demonstrate similarities in syntax and structure.

In the next lesson we will start coding by writing the required “Hello World” in ASP.NET using C#.