News

New DevPartner Studio 7.1 boosts .NET support

• By John K. Waters
• September 29, 2003

Compuware Corp. last week started shipping the latest version of its enterprise application development tools for the Microsoft .NET Framework: DevPartner Studio 7.1 Professional Edition.

First unveiled last year, Compuware's DevPartner product family is a suite of tools specifically designed for developers building applications and Web services using Microsoft Visual Studio .NET and Visual Studio 6.0. The new version is said to integrate with Microsoft Visual Studio .NET 2003 and 2002, and with Windows Server 2003, while supporting what the company calls "side-by-side operation" of the two VS.NET dev environments. In other words, officials said, systems running both .NET versions can utilize the new version of DevPartner Studio. The new version also continues support for Visual Studio 6, service pack 5.

The pro edition of DevPartner Studio is aimed primarily at corporate developer working on large, distributed applications, and the new version includes some upgrades designed to make their lives a lot easier. Perhaps the most noteworthy new feature is its memory analysis capability. The ability to accurately profile an application's memory usage is considered one of the keys to improved application runtime performance and resource utilization.

The new memory analysis feature incorporates "intuitive" graphs and data tables that show objects that are in memory, how much memory objects consume, references that keep objects in memory, and methods that allocated objects. These views, along with accompanying detailed data, enable developers to uncover object leaks and other memory errors and inefficiencies in .NET applications, company officials said. Memory analysis has the ability to correlate remotely collected data into a single session file.

IDC analyst Richard Heiman predicted that the new version of the toolset will "aid developers in detecting and correcting problems earlier in the development life cycle with consequent improvements in quality, schedules and productivity."

Compuware is pricing its DevPartner Studio 7.1 Professional Edition at $1,495 per seat. More information is available at www.compuware.com.