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At Tech.Ed: Microsoft says it has shipped 1 million Visual Studio .NET packs

[April 12, 2002] - Microsoft Corp. development tools managers put forward the company’s evolving vision for XML-based Web services yesterday at the Tech.Ed 2002 conference in New Orleans.

Among the speakers was Paul Flessner, Microsoft senior vice president of .NET Enterprise Servers, who told developers that the effect of Web services on the Internet will be akin to the introduction of standard gauge track to railroads in the 1880s. Commerce will expand, he indicated as “‘Web services’ gets the rails to align.”

“The exciting thing is that we get to build on the success of the Internet model. XML Web services are the foundation for the programmable Internet,” said Eric Rudder, senior vice president for Developer and Platform Evangelism, at an earlier conference keynote.

The company showed examples of it Global XML Web Services Architecture (GXA), first discussed at its Professional Developers Conference last fall. At the conference, Don Box -- a recent Microsoft hire and co-creator of SOAP -- described GXA as an “application-level network.”

Microsoft took the occasion of Tech.Ed to announce that its Visual Studio .NET product, released in February, had shipped more than 1 million units.

Also at Tech.Ed, Microsoft launched the latest version of its Commerce Server. New features in Commerce Server 2002 include support for the .NET Application Framework and .NET Passport Integration. At the same time, Microsoft forged a deal with IBM and Verisign to enforce better security in Web service transactions. The company also discussed SQL Server CE 2.0, a 1.1 Mbyte memory-footprint database for mobile devices.