Datasheet

Having so many separate languages and tools, the architect teams recognized that the whole visual
aspect could be separated from the languages. Why create separate IDEs for all the languages
and tools if they could fi t into the same environment? That was when the idea of Visual Studio
was born.
Visual Studio 97 and 6.0
In 1997, Microsoft built a single environment to integrate multiple languages into one application
surface. This was released as Visual Studio 97, bundling Microsoft development tools for the fi rst
time. This package contained Visual Basic 5.0, Visual C++ 5.0, Visual FoxPro 5.0, and Visual
J++ 1.1 from the set of existing tools. The bundle was also extended with Visual InterDev, a new
tool for developing dynamically generated Web sites using the Active Server Pages (ASP) technology.
A snapshot of the Microsoft Developer Network Library was also a part of the package.
At this time, the IDE named Developer Studio integrated only Visual C++, J++, Visual InterDev, and
MSDN. The name “ Visual Studio ” was rather the name of the bundle (because Visual Basic and
Visual FoxPro had their own IDEs).
The famous and long - lived logo of Visual Studio that resembles the sign of infi nity (or to the Moebius
strip) was introduced with the fi rst version. You can clearly recognize it from the package cover shown
in Figure 1 - 1.
Shortly after the 1997 version, in June 1998, Visual
Studio 6.0 was released. It did not contain too many
new things, but fi xed early integration issues to make
the product more robust. The version numbers of all
of its constituent parts also moved to 6.0 to suggest
a higher level of integrity among the individual tools.
However, instead of three IDEs in Visual Studio
97, version 6.0 had four, because Visual C++ got its
own IDE.
Microsoft understood the challenge of the Java
phenomenon. Not only the language, but also
the managed nature of the Java platform inspired
the company to make a huge leap in regard to a
development platform shift. The huge amount of
research and development work done between
1998 and 2002 led to the introduction of the .NET
Framework. This new platform entirely changed the
future of Visual Studio.
VISUAL STUDIO.NET 2002 AND 2003
In July 2000, the .NET Framework was fi rst announced publicly at Professional Developers
Conference (PDC) in Orlando, Florida. At PDC, Microsoft also demonstrated C#, and announced
ASP+ (which was later renamed to ASP.NET) and Visual Studio.NET. It took more than a year
FIGURE 1 - 1: The Visual Studio 97 package
Visual Studio.NET 2002 and 2003
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