Microsoft seeks to show .NET is real

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By Carol Sliwa

(IDG) -- A Microsoft executive will try to show IT professionals "how .NET and XML Web services are real today" during this week's TechEd conference in New Orleans, a company spokesman said.

Microsoft plans to showcase corporations and vendor partners that are using its new .NET development environment to build real-world applications and XML-based Web services, according to John Montgomery, a group product manager for the .NET platform.

But .NET, which shipped in February, has hardly become pervasive in corporate production environments yet. Most enterprise users are just starting to explore .NET and Web services technologies, said several analysts, early adopters and even Microsoft vendor partners last week.

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Gradual Adoption

Mark Driver, an analyst at Stamford, Connecticut-based Gartner Inc., said he expects .NET adoption to be gradual over the next five years.

"Most adoption is really going to kick in next year," he said, adding that Microsoft users "have very little choice."

But Driver said he routinely advises his clients to avoid deploying mission-critical applications that rely on .NET for at least six to nine months.

Jon Stotts, a spokesman for Microsoft partner iWay Software, a wholly owned subsidiary of Information Builders Inc. in New York that makes components to help integrate business applications, said his firm's enterprise customers are also showing great interest in .NET and Web services. But none of the interested companies is beyond the proof-of-concept stage.

"Our customers are very conservative, so it will probably be a long time before the majority of our customers are implementing these solutions," Stotts predicted, noting that his firm's clients include many Fortune 100 companies. He added that users "are still trying to figure out exactly how they're going to improve their business processes" by using .NET.

But Driver said some firms may see advantages to using .NET today, particularly if they write Web applications, because Microsoft's ASP.NET is "heads and tails more powerful" than its Active Server Pages predecessors.

The life insurance division of Newport Beach, California-based Pacific Life Insurance Co., for instance, has noted a 20 percent to 30 percent performance improvement in Web page delivery since switching to ASP.NET, according to Cameron Cosgrove, the division's CIO.

Cosgrove said that about six of his developers adopted Microsoft's beta tool last year and converted the division's Web site to ASP.NET. They also built two Web services to transfer information between the company's front end and database using XML-based messages sent via the Simple Object Access Protocol.

Cosgrove said he's been impressed with the .NET tool's ability to help developers more quickly build cleaner code that's easier to deploy.