"Microsoft Corp. this week... made available advance copies of
Visual Studio .Net, which is the next version of its Visual Studio
developer tool set. The company also shipped the first beta version
of the .Net Framework, which consists of runtime class libraries
and other components essential to building and deploying
applications over the Internet."
"It remains to be seen how committed Microsoft is to making .Net
work across other platforms, said Meta Group analyst Will Zachmann.
"Whether the runtime environment is going to be on Linux or
Unix remains to be seen," Zachmann said. "If they're smart they
will do that."
"However, not surprisingly, Microsoft officials said .Net
applications will be optimized for Windows 2000. "Windows 2000
will have the most mature tools," said Michael Risse, general
manager of Microsoft's .Net Solutions Group."