Microsoft previews next version of Visual Studio

The next version of Visual Studio--likely to be named Visual Studio98--willbe a better integrated suite than the current version. Gross, who recentlyleft Borland for Microsoft, mentioned that Visual Studio now accounts forover half of Microsoft's development tools sales and that Visual J++ is nowthe leading Java development tool with a 50% market share. Also, moredevelopers use Visual Studio to work with Oracle databases than useOracle'sown tools. Visual Studio has only been available for one month, which makesthese figures all the more compelling.

Plans for the next Visual Studio include a single, integrated environmentfor all of the tools (currently, Visual Basic and FoxPro use separateIDEs).Expect it to be more like the Visual Basic 5.0 IDE than the currentDeveloperStudio IDE.

The next version of Visual InterDev, a key component of Visual Studio, willbe able to create Dynamic HTML pages in addition to server-side ActiveServer Pages. For the next version of Visual C++, the company is working tosimplify the program development process so that applications can be morequickly deployed.

The Web page debugger, designed for Active Server Pages, will be bundledwith Internet Information Server 4.0, code-named "K2." It will also be madeavailable for free to users of Visual InterDev