"To really meet enterprise needs, a ways to go, but it's clearly better than what they were providing," says David Kelly, vice president of the Hurwitz Group's application strategies service. While Visual Studio 6 takes the next step on the path that began with Visual Studio 97, some industry analysts don't think Microsoft went far enough to turn Visual Studio into a true enterprise development suite. Visual Basic and Visual C++ are being announced this month (see related stories in this issue) they will both be released in conjunction with Visual Studio.
Visual FoxPro 6.0 was announced in May, but will not be available until Visual Studio is released. Preview versions of Visual InterDev 6.0 and Visual J++ 6.0 were released in March. Microsoft has been announcing or releasing preview versions of these environments in preparation for the formal launch of Visual Studio 6.0 at Developer Days on September 2. These features all serve to support Microsoft's five development environments.
Visual studio enterprise 6.0 license#
The Enterprise Edition of Visual Studio also includes a development and test license for the BackOffice suite. This toolset includes a query designer for designing SQL queries, a database designer for creating and modifying Microsoft SQL Server and Oracle tables and database schemas, a stored procedures editor, a tool for debugging stored procedures, and a database projects management tool. In addition to adding support for ActiveX Data Objects (ADO) in all of the Visual Studio tools, Microsoft has also updated the Visual Database Tools included with the enterprise edition. Developers can access components in the Repository through Visual Modeler, Visual InterDev, Visual J++, Visual C++, Visual Basic, and Visual Component Manager 2.0, a component catalog system that developers can use to publish and locate components. Microsoft has also included a few existing products in the suite for the first time, including the Visual SourceSafe 6.0 version control system and the Microsoft Repository 2.0, which allows component information to be shared by multiple developers and tools.
Visual studio enterprise 6.0 software#
(Cupertino, Calif., supports the Unified Modeling Language, a notation for software design. The tool, which was jointly developed with Rational Software Corp. Developers can use Visual Modeler to create visual representations of components and their methods, and to connect those components into a software map. The suite also includes several updated features, such as Visual Modeler 2.0, which can be used as an electronic whiteboard in the initial stages of application development, and can also provide documentation to help other developers understand the structure of an application. This data can be combined with information from the performance monitor to provide information about how much memory or processor time each event used. Analyzer also generates Gantt-style reports that list and organize events, including when they occurred and how long they took. The diagrams display relationships between components dynamically as the application runs. Analyzer is designed to help developers understand existing distributed applications by diagramming the application's components and their interactions. One of these features, Visual Studio Analyzer, is completely new. Most of these features either have been upgraded or are integrated in Visual Studio for the first time.
Visual Studio 6.0 is available in "Professional" and "Enterprise" editions, but many of the features that help Visual Studio 6.0 better meet large-shop development requirements are available only in the enterprise edition. Microsoft designed Visual Studio 6.0 to enable component-based development, enterprise data access and team development, and to support the development life cycle. Version 6.0 will include updated versions of Visual Basic, Visual C++, Visual J++, Visual InterDev and Visual FoxPro, as well as a number of new or newly integrated tools that are intended to bind Visual Studio into a fully-integrated enterprise development suite. By the beginning of September, Microsoft plans to release a new version of its Visual Studio development suite.