Academia gets its own Visual Studio.Net

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By Matt Berger

(IDG) -- Students and professors learning to write software and applications for Microsoft Corp.'s .Net initiative got a helping hand Tuesday. The company announced that it will release an academic version of its development software Visual Studio.Net, which includes features for incorporating the software into a college-level software development course.

Bill Gates, Microsoft's chairman and chief software architect, unveiled the new developers' tools to a group of Microsoft's academic partners Tuesday during a two-day Research Faculty Summit at the company's headquarters in Redmond, Washington. During a presentation there, Gates also officially announced the release of key portions of Microsoft's Windows CE source code under the company's Shared Source License.

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Visual Studio.Net is the toolkit Microsoft has said will be key for building Web services and other applications based on its .Net framework. Currently being beta tested, the software includes Microsoft's Common Language Runtime, enabling developers to write code in more than 20 languages, from Java to Microsoft's own emerging language, C#.

"It turns out academia is very interested in .Net," said David Lazar, group product manager for Visual Studio.Net, pointing to two main reasons -- multilingual capabilities and the use of public Internet standards.

Academics find the multilingual characteristic important because it allows fledgling developers to learn to write code in a variety of languages without having to learn multiple frameworks.

"Another important issue is based on public Internet standards," he said. "HTML (Hypertext Markup Language), SOAP (Simple Object Access Protocol), XML (Extensible Markup Language) -- all of these make great teaching opportunities and they're all available through .Net."

The Academic release of Visual Studio.Net is part of the MSDN (Microsoft Developers Network) Academic Alliance program, which offers price breaks and other perks to colleges and universities worldwide that teach and do research based on Microsoft's technology. The academic release of the software is a beefed-up version of Visual Studio.Net Professional, only it includes a number of academic-specific features.

An altered user interface in the academic version allows teachers to create and track assignments for students, review student work and post grades. Students can use Visual Studio.Net Academic to complete an assignment and submit it for review. From within the software, a teacher can auto compile a student's work to test if an assignment was done correctly, and look at the source code a student creates.

The entire family of Visual Studio.Net software products will be available in the U.S. by the year's end, Microsoft said. The software will be available outside the U.S. in staggered releases days to weeks following a U.S. release.

Pricing is yet to be announced, though academic institutions will be able to purchase the software on a year subscription under the MSDN Universal subscription plan for $799. That package will include Visual Studio.Net Academic and all the related software and licenses necessary for incorporating Visual Studio.Net into the course load.