[H-GEN] [Fwd: INFO: Visual Studio.NET Too Loose for Mission Critical Apps]

[Arjen Lentz]

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+ Visual Studio.NET Too Loose for Mission Critical Apps

By Jason Stamper

Microsoft Corp has conceded that its Visual Studio.NET development 
environment is not ideal for the development of mission critical 
applications. Yet at its launch last Wednesday (CI No 4,354) Microsoft 
described the product as its most important to date for developers.

The Redmond, Washington-based firm has now admitted that the "loosely 
coupled" nature of its .NET Framework means that developers are more likely 
to use Visual Studio.NET to expose or integrate their existing 
mission-critical applications, rather than actually  building them. "The 
first applications are not going to be the mission-critical applications," 
Mark Quirk, Microsoft group technical manager for the .NET developer group 
told ComputerWire.

Microsoft's .NET Framework means that applications written using Visual 
Studio.NET are "loosely coupled". Tightly coupled transactions, on the 
other hand, rely on what developers call "two-phase commit", a way of 
ensuring simplicity of design, but just as importantly data integrity and 
security. Under two-phase commit, an object can only fulfill a transaction 
if it has confirmation from a second object that it is able to do so.

But Microsoft's .NET Framework does away with two-phase commit, opting 
instead for a loosely coupled scheme where objects or components do not 
need to know as much about each other. There are advantages to being 
loosely coupled - it can prove faster, and make it easier to integrate 
components, which is the major reason for Microsoft choosing to abandon a 
tightly coupled approach. In the web services world, the components of an 
application may be distributed around an intranet or even the internet, so 
communication between them was kept deliberately loose.

Portsmouth, New Hampshire-based software development tools vendor Bowstreet 
Inc's Andy Roberts, VP and CTO said: "I think Microsoft and IBM thought 
they needed to get something out fast and make it a standard, so they got 
SOAP [Simple Object Access Protocol] out - it's simple and working, but 
transactions are loosely coupled." SOAP, an emerging web services standard, 
uses so-called "available to promise" transactions - a loosely coupled 
messaging approach with compensating transactions in the event of failure.
Microsoft's Quirk, meanwhile, said the development of mission-critical 
applications with Visual Studio.NET will ramp up as the standards in the 
web services world mature. "They may well be internal type applications to 
start with," he said. "Like [UK building society] the Nationwide, which is 
using Visual Studio.NET to define its mortgage process. The first phase of 
Visual Studio.NET may well be exposing the core stuff [customers] have 
already got. Maybe we will see mission-critical applications being built, 
but I wouldn't like to say how soon that will be."

Either way, if Microsoft does not include the most reliable two-phase 
commit transaction handling in Visual Studio.NET by default, there are 
others who will add it for developers as part of their offering. Barry 
Morris, CEO of Dublin, Ireland-based component development and integration 
company Iona Technologies Plc said: "That's the difference between us and 
Microsoft. We have a very good two phase commit protocol, and it works very 
well over SOAP, too. Microsoft doesn't have that, and it's not high on 
their priorities either."

Jason Stamper is the editor of Computer Business Review (CBR), 
ComputerWire's monthly magazine for IT strategists.





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