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 runtime platform, and the BizTalk Server application integration platform. SQL Server last received a major update in 2012, and new versions of Visual Studio and the .NET Framework became available coinciding with the release of Windows 8.

Microsoft also offers Windows 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. (See the sidebar “Windows 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 as follows:

Integration Services, which extracts data from operational systems for analysis
BI features, which enable

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