"Our strength has always been our tool set and our developer mind share," says David White, senior technology specialist for Microsoft. "If we go on the open standards and protocols, such as XML and HTTP, and build solutions on our platform to talk to other platforms, we could show better total cost of ownership, faster time to market, and better scalability in the tool set."

ASP.Net uses Common Language Runtime (CLR) to allow Visual Basic 7, JavaScript and JScript, and C# to talk to one another. Because this compiled, object-oriented language is the basis for VB, JavaScript and C#, they can support inheritance and overloading to each others' objects. This allows programmers to write in whatever language they're most comfortable with or best suits their application. What's more, moving to a compiled language instead of an interpreted one should enhance application performance.

"I think that's the beauty of it-that you can build your application on the platform and tools that best fit your needs," White says. "And the good thing about that is when that tool/platform/programming paradigm no longer fits your needs, you can go ahead and replace it without affecting your clients...as long as your XML interface stays the same."

As a downside, VB-only programmers may not be comfortable with object-oriented programming, particularly now that it's included in VB.

".Net gives developers much more power, and the only cost to them is going to be some additional training," White says. "If you use it to its full extent, it requires you to have a base understanding of object-oriented design principles and application principles. And I would venture to say that the majority of VB programmers do not have that knowledge, and will have to acquire that knowledge to make full use of what we're providing as a tool set."

ASP.Net also tries to ease the developer's job by providing a Frameworks Class Library, or FCL, that offers reusable objects for standard programming functions. For instance, coding support for various browsers can someday become as ancient as DOS.

"Financial institutions that go to the Web end up coding large libraries. This is now built into the Microsoft framework so they can have one set of code, and the framework will generate the correct code for each class," White says. "To me, I think that's one of the biggest benefits."

Another goal of .Net is to simplify deploying applications and eliminate rebooting servers for COM upgrades. Named "XCopy deployment," it allows registering to become simple copying instead of having to go to each server to register deployments.

ActiveX Data Objects (ADO) also takes on the .Net suffix. Traditionally ADO has been used to return data to high performance applications. ADO.Net is expected to improve on that by supporting current industry standards and using the DataSet object. Applications that use ADO.Net's disconnected or remote recordsets will use XML to transfer data, so business partners can exchange data without it being proprietary to one language.

"It's a simple process to work with data, and get data from the database," Seven says. "It's also easier to replicate portions of your database. You can use multiple tables and scan relationships between them."
White expects Microsoft to extend its support times for its current products when .Net is rolled out. "Microsoft realizes now that it's in the enterprise space and it can't just turn around and drop support for VB 6," he says. "So one of the things we're telling customers is we don't want you to feel that you have to upgrade to .Net."
Developers can download .Net betas for free from msdn.microsoft.com/net. Seven recommends spending a little time every day testing .Net. But don't look for the official release of .Net until at least the year's end, which means not only a Visual Studio.Net, but also .Net integration with other Microsoft products.

The Move to Web Services

As IBM, Sun, Hewlett-Packard, Oracle, and smaller vendors announce their Web services solutions, Microsoft hopes that .Net will become the developer's method of choice for deploying this much-talked-about technology.

A Web service is a programmable application logic that provides data and services to other application logic, and is accessible through the Web protocols SOAP, UDDI, XML and HTTP. Using these standard protocols, the platform, object model, and programming language that implement the service are irrelevant, as long as the service understands how to send and receive SOAP messages.

Because Web services are XML-based, developers can use traditional Microsoft tools, Java or CORBA-or .Net when it becomes available. And there's no longer a need to write different translation layers from one system or programming paradigm to the next.

"You do not have to wait for .Net to write Web services," says David White, senior technology specialist for Microsoft. "You can write them today in Microsoft's tools, you can write them today in somebody else's tools-Apache, Java, Perl, whatever."

Because Web services can be deployed using any language, developers in the insurance and financial services industries can take advantage of its capabilities to exchange data with agents, carriers, and business partners.

Doug Seven, coauthor of Programming Data-Driven Web Applications with ASP.Net and CEO of codejunkies.net, says that insurance companies can save time using Web services because quotes can be constantly updated and delivered instantly. "Insurance companies can build policy pricing for agents around the country who can access the application," he says. "And the corporate offices can have centralized data that are longer tied to a particular language or operating system-that's all done behind the scenes."
Web services also can be used for intranets, extranets and e-commerce.

"I recommend that companies evaluate Web services today, especially the financial sector," White says. He says the perfect example of a need for a Web service, which derived from an actual customer, is using it to access someone else's actuarial data because you wouldn't have to write and store the data yourself.

White says Web services are a good swing away from old methodology because, instead of exchanging COBOL programs and data layouts, you're exchanging data through XML. "That's a change, but it allows your system to be more agile-to change without affecting everybody around you," White says. "Because that was the old problem: When I let everybody have my database layouts and my COBOL programs, when I wanted to change, I had to check with every single system that ever connected to me to ask their permission to change my own system. That's what I think we need to get away from. If you can abstract that away into a Web service, you can change what goes on behind without too much pain."

Cristine Antolik is a free-lance writer in Cincinnati, Ohio, and former webmaster for The National Underwriter Company.