Microsoft 97 offerings coming

Microsoft is releasing various "97" and "V5" products this Spring, startingnext week with the release of Front Page 97 on January 8. Front Page 97will ship in two versions, a stand-alone product for approximately $120 and an upgrade for users of 1.1 that will sell for approximately $50. On January16, Microsoft is releasing the long-awaited Office 97, which will sell intoo many versions to catalog. Each of the Office products will also sellseparately.Later, in March, Microsoft will release their "V5" line of Internet development products, code-named Boston (according to the print version ofInfoWorld). The V5 products include Visual Basic 5, Visual C++ 5.0 (code-named Orion), Visual FoxPro 5, Visual InterDev (formerly Internet Studio),Developer Studio 97 (the IDE for most of these programs), Visual J++ 1.1,and Visual SourceSafe 5.0. The interesting thing here is that all ofthese programs, except for VB 5 and FoxPro, work out of the same integrated development environment, so it is possible to work on severalrelated but language-independent, projects at the same time.Some of these programs can be downloaded in beta form from the Web now