Migration of Server Products to .NET

Since .NET jelled, Microsoft has been laboring to migrate all its server products to the .NET Framework, support for .NET development tools, and web services where appropriate. While .NET has been used as an overall brand for many Microsoft products, the .NET Framework and object model have been integrated into server products in the 2002/2003 generation. As of late 2003, the following products had shipped .NET versions:

Windows Server 2003

Exchange Server 2003

Content Management Server 2002

Commerce Server 2002

SharePoint Portal Server 2003

BizTalk Server

Now that virtually the entire Microsoft enterprise product line has been adapted to be friendly to .NET, there are strong arguments for buying into this coherent server architecture and development environment. A developer taking this approach has a much larger arsenal of weapons. With a family of desktop applications, servers, and operating systems all built to support the same languages and development approach, Microsoft now has a key differentiator in the portal market. While other vendors have built or acquired products for services such as document management, content management, collaboration, and application integration, they often rely on different programming and scripting languages with limited ability to share code and components among the products.