Application Platform

As managing vice president, Rob Helm covers Microsoft collaboration and content management. His 25-plus years of experience analyzing Microsoft’s technology... more

Several server products, tools, and Windows components help developers build applications on the Microsoft platform. They include the SQL Server database product, the Visual Studio integrated development environment (IDE), the .NET Framework run-time platform, and the BizTalk Server application integration platform. SQL Server received a major update in Apr. 2014, and the most recent release of major versions of Visual Studio and the .NET Framework arrived in July 2015.

Microsoft also offers Azure, a cloud platform for application hosting and data storage, which includes Platform as a Service (PaaS) components and Infrastructure as a Service (IaaS) components and serves as the hosting platform for Visual Studio Online, a set of cloud-based developer tools and services. Azure is covered comprehensively in the Azure Roadmap. (See the sidebar “Azure“.)

SQL Server

The SQL Server software consists of a database management system and a business intelligence (BI) platform. Key components included in the product are the following:

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