.NET is the next platform that incorporates Web interaction and that will introduce a third generation of Web applications (Web Services). Microsoft, which is investing 4 billion dollars a year in development and research, has been working in developing this platform that Bill Gates introduced in June last year during the Forum 2000 for four years. A month later, they launched it for the developers to whom a highly interconnected world was anticipated. A world interconnected through different devices that communicate by using Internet standards (HTML, XML, SOAP).
Microsoft's strategy for elaborating the platform .NET is also designing hardware devices for this platform (Tablet PC, cellular phones of the next generation) as well as operative systems for these devices (Pocket PC); services' development (Web Services)
Offered through the Internet in software modality to be 'consumed', and not acquired; several products that constitute Microsoft servers' generation 2000 specifically prepared for supporting this platform and the interoperability it implies (HTML, XML, SOAP's support); a new execution environment of .NET Framework code that together with the new version of Visual Studio .NET's development tools' set will be launched this year 2001).
ARTech and Microsoft are technological business partners and when facing this new strategy of the corporation ARTech is working directly with Microsoft in the United States on integrating GeneXus ' tools with .NET Framework and VisualStudio.NET, apart from having projects in the area of .NET Services, País informed.
ARTech's importance for Microsoft is the impact that GeneXus has in developing business applications in Latin America and other countries, he outlined.
.NET Framework
The new execution environment is designed for running on any device that uses Windows and Windows CE as operative systems.
Among the characteristics of the new execution environment we outline the great improvements related to the applications' execution's reliability and security. .NET Framework detects and solves the usual problems in the applications' development. It is in charge of the memory's management and improves their installation.
On the other hand, .NET Framework unifies the programming interfaces (APIs).
In this execution environment all the languages will be a first player, so any programmer that uses any language of the .NET Framework is going to share the same interfaces, the same data type and functions' libraries for accessing the Framework's services, no matter if he is programming with C# (C-Sharp) – Microsoft's new programming language - Visual Basic, or C++.
Besides, it improves Web applications and services' development. For example, adding an attribute to the name of the function that you want to export to the Web and then recompiling is enough in order to publish such functionality on the Internet.
'.NET Framework's goal is to turn Windows into the ideal platform to develop Web applications, traditional Windows' applications and Web services', País said.
The Web Services
The first generation of applications on the Internet used static pages, following the original concept for which the Web was designed: sharing information based on documents (Web pages). With this criterion, the information was visualized through HTML documents with hyperlinks that were transmitted by using standard protocols.
But when facing the need for generating interactivity for carrying out financial transactions, for example, they started to generate dynamic pages and the second generation of applications on the Internet came out.
Because of this need for interaction (consuming a Web site's services from another Web site) that the second-generation applications needed, Microsoft, together with other companies, developed a protocol called SOAP (Simple Object Access Protocol) built on XML, which allows executing remote code. The third-generation applications are even more ambitious. It implies integrating the business processes on the Internet.
This is to say, the sites will offer the user interface as well as the business processes. And for this third generation Microsoft developed the .NET Framework, a platform to which the developer will be able to integrate everything he has today in production, apart from offering services on the Internet, like GXChart (www.GXChart.com.uy), a Web Service developed in GeneXus by ARTech with the technology that is available today (ASP pages on Windows 2000/IIS).
'Microsoft will develop massive Web Services that can be re-used by the developers. Security services, for example', Wilson País explained. Passport, the web service that enables the authentication in several Internet sites by logging only once, is one of Microsoft's web services and it is already in production.
'With the SOAP Toolkit for Visual Studio 6.0 –which is free- you can already develop Web Services today and get ready for Visual Studio.NET's arrival', País said, and he invites the developers to study and use XML, SOAP and the .NET Framework SDK (available at http://msdn.microsoft.com).