Microsoft introduces Visual Studio.NET

Las Vegas

In his Comdex/Fall 2000 kickoff keynote address, Bill Gates, Chairman and Chief Software Architect Microsoft announced the public availability of the first beta version of Microsoft Visual Studio.NET and the Microsoft .NET Framework, two key technologies for enabling developers to build Web services on the .NET Platform. 

Web services are applications and components made available over the Web via XML and SOAP, and are the key programmable building blocks of the next-generation Internet. Microsoft is making beta 1 of Visual Studio.NET and the .NET Framework broadly available to millions of customers and industry partners.

Gates also announced the formal submission of C# (pronounced `C-sharp') and the Common Language Infrastructure (CLI) specifications to ECMA, a vendor-neutral international standards organization committed to driving industry wide adoption of information and communications technologies. This submission, co-sponsored by Intel Corp and HP Co, delivers on


the promise of standardizing key technologies to enable greater interoperability between computing environments and thus helps companies leverage existing knowledge and current investments in software development infrastructure to build the next-generation Internet.

"Just as Visual Basic 1.0 made developing applications easier and more accessible to a broad set of developers, I am confident that Visual Studio.NET and the .NET Framework will have a similar effect on the development of Web Services," Gates said. "Our goal is to provide developers with the ultimate development tools and a multi-language framework for rapidly building Web services, " he added.

By submitting C#--an object-oriented language derived from C and C++--and the CLI--a subset of the .NET Framework--to ECMA, Microsoft is following through on its commitment to standardize key interoperability technologies. C# provides the world's first component-oriented language for C and C++ developers. CLI includes base-class libraries and necessary plumbing components, enabling other software vendors to support C# on any operating system.