Microsoft .NET

MitemView is an integration framework that can be customized by using Microsoft's programming languages. By customized we mean that the application specific business logic and integration control logic can be programmed in Visual Basic or Visual C#. The resulting application inter-operates with the MitemView framework at runtime via an event-driven interface.

When interfacing with Microsoft development tools it is helpful to think about the world before the announcement of .NET and the world after.

Before .NET the principal Microsoft interface technology used with MitemView was COM (Component Object Model). Applications that present a COM-based interface can be configured in multiple flavors including regular COM, COM+, MTS (Microsoft Transaction Server and ASP (Active Server Pages).

MITEM's NXTier Services supports all COM interfaces. One simply uses the NXTier Services Toolkit to develop a Delegate that exposes a component interface and installs as a business object. This Delegate establishes a synchronous connection in keeping with COM conventions. The requesting application can invoke methods on this business object and NXTier automatically executes the appropriate services on the remote MitemView Server.

.NET IS THE FUTURE

With the advent of the .NET Framework one has to consider more than just the Microsoft object model. Fortunately, given the tight integration between MitemView and Microsoft's most widely used development tool -Visual Basic - MitemView is able to inherit .NET functionality from the Microsoft tool kit.

Other integration products typically include their own proprietary development environment and/or programming language. This means that vendors of such products must constantly play catch-up with Microsoft by manually adding .NET support (or any other Microsoft technology) into their proprietary environments.

MitemView has always been tightly integrated with the leading 3rd party development tools like Visual Basic, PowerBuilder and Java. By using MitemView with a tool like Visual Basic .NET, MITEM's customers are able to enjoy the best of the Microsoft and MITEM worlds combined into a single integrated development environment. With the release of Visual Studio .NET (that includes Visual Basic .NET), Microsoft has created the premiere authoring system for XML Web Services. Visual Studio .NET includes full support for XML, SOAP, WSDL and UDDI.

MITEM's foresight in providing full support for Microsoft's development tools will translate into real value as customers begin to plan their migration to a .NET infrastructure. Those moving from non-Microsoft languages will find the journey much longer and more expensive - most likely requiring a total re-write of their existing applications.