SEVERAL THIRD PARTIES are expected to play supporting roles next Wednesday in the launch of Microsoft's long-anticipated Visual Studio.Net toolbox for building Web services.

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In fact, companies such as ComponentSource, ActiveState, Infragistics, and Crystal Decisions plan to make announcements at the VSLive conference in San Francisco. These third parties are looking to ease component-based development, enable open-source languages to work with Visual Studio, and bring BI (business intelligence) capabilities to the new suite.

"This [Visual Studio.Net] is going to be a high-volume, low-cost Web services platform, and that is what is key. Microsoft is going to undercut on a price/performance basis the costs for developing and deploying and aggregating Web services," said Dana Gardner, an analyst at Boston-based Aberdeen Group.

ComponentSource officials said the vendor plans to announce that its platform for reusing components is available as an add-on to Visual Studio. By integrating the platform directly into Microsoft's toolkit, developers will be able to access both private component repositories and ComponentSource's online component marketplace, thereby making management and reuse of components easier, said Sam Patterson, CEO of ComponetSource, in Kennesaw, Ga.

Also on the application development tools front, Infragistics, a presentation layer developer in East Windsor, N.J., will announce a set of new products for VisualStudio.Net called the NetAdvantage Suite.

The suite, which combines development tools for Microsoft's COM, ASP, and .Net environments, includes the new UltraWebSuite 1.0, a set of server-side components for putting navigation in applications and Web sites, and UltraWinSuite 1.0, a Windows Forms-based tool for rich client application development, officials said.

VisualStudio.Net developers will also be able to work more freely with open source languages such as Perl and Python. "Microsoft created a platform that admits open-source development tools as first-class citizens," said Dick Hardt, CEO of ActiveState, an open-source vendor in Vancouver, Canada.

ActiveState has created a new set of open-source development tools for VisualStudio.Net: Visual Perl, Visual Python, and Visual XSLT (eXtensible Style Sheet Language Translator). XSLT is a language for translating XML schema.

Visual Python and Visual Perl will both include new Web services support.

"A programmer can add a reference to a WSDL (Web Services Description Language) file in Perl or Python and automatically create an object that refers to the service," said Hardt. "Coding is easier because the development tool will then get code completion support."

Adding business intelligence to the tools, Crystal Decisions said that VisualStudio.Net will ship with the Crystal Reports report writing tool. Previous versions of Visual Studio also came with Crystal Reports, but this is the first time the product will be part of the default installation.

"Before we were an option on the fifth CD," said Kathy O'Donoghue, product manager for Crystal Reports for Visual Studio.Net, in Vancouver, Canada. "Now, you will be able to bring a Crystal Report application into .Net and publish it as a Web Service," O'Donoghue said.

Also increasing the usefulness of Visual Studio.Net, earlier this week Rational Software launched Rational XDE, a tool that enables Visual Studio developers to take advantage of Rational's modeling and pattern-based development from within Visual Studio.Net.

Richard Blair, consultant with SEI Information Technology, a development firm in Chicago, said the buzz around VisualStudio.Net is justified. "This is a big change. The .Net Common Language Runtime will make VB [Visual Basic] programmers feel better. VB programmers no longer have to eye C++ with performance envy. Whether or not you program in VB, C#, or C++ becomes simply a matter of taste," he said.

Blair added, however, that the transition to VB will not be an easy one.

"VB.Net is radically different from VB 6.0. It will break all your VB 6.0 applications. Developers who are not used to a true object-oriented environment will have a lot to learn," Blair said.

Analysts said that although Web services are starting to catch on, it is up to the companies driving Web services -- Microsoft, Sun, IBM, BEA, Oracle, Hewlett-Packard -- to demonstrate real-world live examples of major corporations using Web services.

"VisualStudio.Net is all about making Web services easy to create and deploy," said Peter Urban, analyst with AMR Research in Boston. "What Microsoft really needs to do at VSLive is show some large corporate customers actually doing this."