Visual Studio 7 to feature common IDE

When Visual Studio first appeared in early 1996, developers were told toexpect a unified Integrated Development Environment (IDE) in a future release that negate the need to learn different environments for each tool.But the release of Visual Studio 6.0 this Fall did little to solve thisproblem; in fact, there are more different environments this time aroundthen there were in the first version. But Microsoft has a plan to end theconfusion with the release of Visual Studio 7.0, due in late 1999. VS 7.0will feature an enhanced version the Visual Studio environment now used byVisual InterDev and Visual J++ that wil be shared by all components, including Visual C++, Visual Basic and Visual FoxPro.

For Visual Studio 6.0, we tried to get all the different Visual Studio development teams to share as much source code as possible," says MichaelHalcoussis,manager of the Visual Studio environment team. "There are a lotof areas where we worked with all the teams to create a more consistent product. We tried to act as a guiding force to ensure consistent object models, internationalization, accessibility, and other features that neededto be more uniform across Visual Studio. Moving forward, you can expect that we’ll continue focusing on bringing the tools closer together."

How much closer remains to be seen: The individual product teams within Visual Studio tend to operate as their own little fiefdoms.

"When we met with each Visual Studio development team to convince them ofthe need to make their tool consistent with all our other tools, each teamhad different ideas on how they thought this should work," he says. "We hada lot of conversations about the best way to ensure consistency. Each teamfelt one way was better for their users, even though that may not have beenthe best way for our other users."

But even though most of the products in Visual Studio 6.0 features different IDEs, an attempt was made to get them closer together to preparefor the next release.

"We actually used the source code from the Visual Basic IDE to create thenew IDE for Visual J++ 6.0 and Visual InterDev 6.0. Unfortunately, we didn’t have time to fold the new IDE back into Visual Basic 6.0. But because the source code came from the same place, the IDEs at least seemvery similar," Halcoussis says. "The new editor in Visual J++ 6.0 and Visual InterDev 6.0 is our core common editor. Both Visual Basic and VisualC++ will use it in the future."

"For the next release, we’re focused on bringing all the tools even closertogether. The next version of Visual Studio will share more features, making it easier for developers to jump from one language to another as they build their solutions," he says