Oracle, SAP Link to Microsoft Tool

Microsoft’s .NET Framework, announced with great fanfare in 2001, has seen significant adoption among corporate developers and small ISVs, but major enterprise resource planning (ERP) vendors have been slow to join the party. In early 2004, however, Oracle and SAP announced that they would provide better integration between their systems and Visual Studio .NET (VS.NET), Microsoft’s development tool for .NET applications. The change in attitude was driven by the attraction of certain .NET technologies, such as ASP.NET for creating dynamic Web sites, and the success of VS.NET as an extensible developer tool.

Oracle and SAP have joined Microsoft’s Visual Studio .NET Industry Partner (VSIP) program (which already includes Siebel and about 200 smaller vendors). The program gives partners access to the Visual Studio API, allowing them to add new components to VS.NET, build wizards that insert new code or modify existing code in projects (regardless of the programming language being used), and define entirely new project types. As a result, developers will find it easier to target Oracle databases and SAP applications from within VS.NET.