.Net, The Second Time Around

摘要

By many measures, Microsoft's efforts to move its customers to modern programming techniques have been a success. Since the release a year ago of Visual Studio .Net, Microsoft's suite of programming languages for writing Internet applications, more than 2.5 million developers have bought or downloaded the tools. On April 24, Microsoft will release an update to the suite, Visual Studio .Net 2003, that works hand in hand with a new Windows server designed to run Web services out of the box. So far, more than 30 companies, including Allstate, Bear Stearns, the Pepsi Bottling Group, and Xerox, are building applications with the new tools, Microsoft says. Demand for .Net projects has increased this year, says Dean Guida, CEO of independent software developer Infragistics Inc., which is working on projects using the Microsoft Web-friendly architecture at companies including Act maker Best Software, Citigroup, Lehman Brothers, and Morgan Stanley. "We're starting to see our backlog open up," he says, as customers work through their software-development projects.