The development team at KMA is currently using the newest release of the .NET platform, namely Visual Studio 2003 and the .NET Framework 1.1. This most recent release of the .NET Framework provides the following benefits:

The Visual Studio 2003 IDE (Integrated Development Environment)  

Our experience with the Visual Studio 2003 IDE is that it is more stable and offers better performance than Visual Studio 2002. There are many useful improvements, such as caching of the most recently used object properties and methods by Intellisense and automatically generating method stubs for implemented interfaces.

Compatibility with version 1.0 applications

Installation of Visual Studio 2003 is a snap. By default, Visual Studio 2003 and the .NET Framework version 1.1 do not upgrade an existing Visual Studio 2002 environment. A separate instance of the software is installed. This allows both environments, as well as the Visual Studio 6.0 COM-based environment, to peacefully coexist on the same development machine. Although not all applications developed for the .NET Framework 1.0 are 100% compatible with version 1.1 of the framework, we’ve experienced very few compatibility issues. And, as expected, Visual Studio 2003 provides an easy upgrade path for source code projects created by the previous version. We’ve successfully opened our existing Visual Studio 2002 projects in Visual Studio 2003 and converted them without any problems.

Improved code access security  

Microsoft has been made significant advancements toward improving security. Version 1.1 of the .NET Framework provides additional code access security for ASP.NET applications. This improves the code access security provided by the first release of the framework by allowing further granularity of access permissions on a per application basis.

Integrated mobile application development

Visual Studio 2003 and the .Net Framework 1.1 now provide integrated support for developing Pocket PC applications as well as Web applications for WAP-enabled cell phones and PDAs, without having to install any additional products or add-ins.

Smart Devices

Visual Studio 2003 supports the .NET Compact Framework, which is a subset of the .NET Framework that enables application development targeted toward Pocket PC devices. The Windows Forms Designer that is included in Visual Studio 2003 allows development of applications in VB.NET and C# for a variety of devices with different form factors. In addition, integrated device emulators allow the debugging of applications without access to an actual Pocket PC device.

Mobile Web Devices  

Visual Studio 2003 also includes integrated Web Forms Designers, which allow rapid development of web pages that can be displayed on a variety of devices. This makes it possible to develop and deploy “intelligent” web applications that are capable of rendering targeted HTML, optimized for the particular client device.

Version 1.1 of the .NET Framework is included in all editions of Microsoft’s latest server operating system product, Windows Server 2003. Windows Server 2003 provides a more scalable, manageable, and reliable application environment. Using Version 1.1 of the .NET Framework for NET development projects ensures compatibility with the latest Windows server environment.

Future editions of Visual Studio and .NET Framework promise tighter integration with other relevant Microsoft technologies such as SQL Server, Commerce Server, and BizTalk.