According to a TogetherSoft strategic roadmap document obtained by ComputerWire, early in the second quarter this year Borland will launch its anticipated development environment for Microsoft’s .NET platform that will enable development based on Microsoft’s C Sharp language.

That is the product which will enable Borland to compete more directly with Microsoft’s own Visual Studio .NET development environment. However, it may support other languages as well as C Sharp. As reported in Friday’s Computergram, Borland CEO Dale Fuller was tight-lipped on whether it will support additional languages as well as C Sharp.

By the middle of the second quarter, the company should be ready with Together Edition for Visual Studio .NET. This looks likely to be a version of the TogetherSoft modeling software which works with Microsoft Visual Studio .NET, rather than Borland’s own .NET development environment (code-named Sidewinder).

For a combined Borland and TogetherSoft modeling and code-generation environment that supports Microsoft’s .NET framework, customers will have to wait until the beginning of the fourth quarter, according to the roadmap. At that stage the company will launch Together Edition for Borland Sidewinder. Borland recently announced it was the first to license the Microsoft .NET framework software development kit (SDK), and has outlined its intention for its various products to support the .NET framework.

Meanwhile, in an interview with ComputerWire, former TogetherSoft CEO and now Borland chief executive strategist and SVP, Peter Coad, said that the combined company has two main threads to its strategy. The first – deeply connected – essentially means tightly integrated application development and modeling, and is already underway at the company. Even tighter integration is planned, however.

The second major initiative is known as adaptive fit, and is centered on moving application development out of the domain of software developers, into the business arena. According to Coad, the goal is that business analysts and managers will one day be able to model software with easy-to-use tools, but the models that they build will also be able to be manipulated by the more technical developers.

To get to this stage Coad accepts that the companies need to have a single, unified platform rather than separate products with tight integration. By the middle of 2004, [Borland’s Java development environment] JBuilder and ControlCenter [a former TogetherSoft product] will live on a unified platform, said Coad.

Adaptive fit is about whether you’re in IT programming, or you have business domain expertise, you can understand what’s going on, customize business processes and applications, and define what you want them to do, he said. If we can achieve that we will touch a lot more lives than a straight application development company.

Asked whether, as a former CEO, Coad is happy to play second fiddle to Borland CEO Dale Fuller, Coad said: I’m still figuring it out myself. Dale gets that, and has given me a remarkable amount of freedom. At first I was worried if anyone was hearing me when I said something, now I’m concerned just how well I’m heard, so I have to be more careful about what I say. What motivates me is not the paycheck, it’s whether I am making a difference to people’s lives.

As to how well the integration of TogetherSoft into Borland has gone, Coad said: It’s hard work, and there’s a lot of hard work still to do. I see this as a 12-month process. We’re beginning to make those connections of ‘deeply connected’ and ‘adaptive fit’, and I know of no better team to be a part of.

Source: Computerwire