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 NEWSMicrosoft courts VB faithful By Tom Sullivan July 26, 2002 1:01 pm PT CENTRAL TO MICROSOFT'S grand vision of unifying its entire software stack through use of XML is the task of keeping its loyal following of VB (Visual Basic) developers in the fold.
But as Microsoft asks its developers to leap from VB 6 to VB .Net, a growing band of competitors, including BEA Systems, Sun Microsystems, IBM, and Macromedia, are attempting to increase the size of their own developer communities. The learning curve associated with VB .Net is creating an opportunity for competing vendors. "Microsoft has cause to worry that VB developers will think about moving to Java," said Jason Bloomberg, a consulting analyst at ZapThink Research, a Waltham, Mass.-based market research company that specializes in XML and Web services. Microsoft, in turn, is fighting back, working to protect its legion of developers by "doing what we always do," Microsoft's Flores said. On the surface level, the software giant's plan has included upgrade tools and an increased concentration on training its corps of developers through seminars and conferences and via its MSDN (Microsoft Developers Network) Web site, which provides lessons and sample code. Microsoft is also making its toolbox work more cohesively with the rest of its products by planting the .Net Framework in all of its servers over time. Meanwhile, Microsoft's real work is taking place under the hood as it closely aligns disparate product teams, aiming to make its complete set of products work together better using XML as a foundation. And that strategy is being driven from the chief office down. "What we are trying to do for the health of .Net, and the health of the company, and the sanity of people who work [with our products], and the quality of the product produced is to really have a more orchestrated road map of where we are going," CEO Steve Ballmer told InfoWorld at Microsoft's Fusion 2002 conference in Los Angeles earlier this month. "We are working hard to make sure there is a whole [that] becomes bigger than the sum of the parts." Keeping developers on board during this process is a top priority. According to a survey by Evans Data, more than half of all developers plan to use Java during some part of the time they spend programming this year and next year, whereas only 3 percent will use it exclusively. Use of VB, on the other hand, is expected to decline slightly, with 43.5 percent of respondents planning to use VB next year, down from 46 percent this year. Microsoft's most viable competitors are acutely aware of the opportunity to lure away VB developers. BEA is targeting VB developers with its WebLogic Workshop toolset and developer resources that emulate MSDN. IBM's WebSphere Studio Application Developer tools are aimed at the same spot. In April, Macromedia announced its plan to make it easier for developers to build Web services by tying its front-end Flash MX and Dreamweaver MX tools to the ColdFusion scripting server and by supporting both Java and .Net. Simon Phipps, Palo Alto, Calif.-based Sun's chief technology evangelist, said the company is taking steps to make its own Sun ONE (Open Net Environment) tools more VB-like by adding a simplified but more powerful user interface and by opening the tools to third-party support. Phipps said, however, that Java developers are already hard-core programmers who have taken the leap to the multithreaded, distributed computing that VB developers are only now facing. "Java developers and the Java tools have already gone through that migration," Phipps said. "The truth is, if you want to move out of the world of VB, you'll have to get a clue about enterprise computing." Analysts said that, as companies and developers consider a move to the emerging Web services architecture, Java becomes attractive. "Given that developers tend to go for a more refined, proven toolset and one that has a lot of momentum, Web services is one of the reasons for moving to Java," said Dana Gardner, an analyst at Aberdeen Group in Boston. Pitney Bowes is one such company. The $4 billion provider of integrated mail and document management solutions is starting to use Java as it moves to Web services, said Kevin Bodie, engineering manager of advanced concepts and the technology systems lab at Pitney Bowes in Stamford, Conn. Bodie describes Pitney Bowes as primarily a Windows-based developer shop. "[But] we're starting to change that. We're using a fair amount of Java so we can port applications between platforms," he said. Bodie added that the company is also using VB .Net and that one of its customers has asked Pitney Bowes to port a J2EE-based application to .Net. Yet the road from VB 6 to VB .Net is no primrose path. In fact, when asked to gauge the learning curve to get from VB 6 to VB .Net, Mack Richardson, an application developer at Volvo Action Services in Greensboro, N.C., answered in one word: "Big." Richardson has used VB .Net to build Web services that enable integration of SQL Server and CRM applications on the back end with a front-end call-center interface. "The difference between VB 6 and VB .Net is very big. The whole language is a lot more like C now," Richardson said, specifying that the way VB .Net handles objects was a hurdle for Volvo. Indeed, experts said that VB .Net requires more study and discipline than its predecessor because it is more object-oriented, requires a new approach to packaging and deploying applications, and is less forgiving. Furthermore, VB .Net requires programmers to leave behind the familiar API and IDE (integrated development environment), which have been replaced by the .Net Framework and the cross-language Visual Studio .Net IDE, respectively. Conventional wisdom dictates that when developers have to make a change they tend to make the biggest leap they can. Microsoft, for its part, says that this learning curve is typical for new iterations of tools and that even though the company is asking its developers to learn new tricks, the payoff is well worth the effort. "We're notorious for putting our developers through learning curves. If you look at the VB community, they have been through a lot of learning curves," Microsoft's Flores said. The new version of VB offers developers a number of advantages over VB 6, including the ability to build multithreaded applications, distributed computing applications, and Windows services. Those advances, however, come at a price, according to Eric Blankenburg, director of engineering at Avanade, a Seattle-based solutions integrator that is a joint venture between Microsoft and Accenture. "The price is that a typical VB programmer all of a sudden is presented with the real platform where nothing is hidden anymore," Blankenburg said. For C++ developers, .Net makes things easier, and for C++ and C# developers, "productivity increases by an order of magnitude," he added. Joel Zinn, senior IT architect at Tulsa, Okla.-based American Electric Power, agrees. "Prior to our use of .Net, our group was not a very strong object-oriented team," Zinn said. "With the productivity enhancements built in, we were productive using [Visual Basic.Net] the first week." Analysts agree that VB is still easier to use than Java, for now. "As WebLogic Workshop and IBM's Application Developer roll out, they will compete fiercely with Microsoft's tools," said John Meyer, an analyst at Giga Information Group in Cambridge, Mass. Ed Scannell contributed to this article. SPONSORED WHITE PAPERS 
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