Borland Software Corp will increase its support for .NET with development tools the company believes will win corporate backing despite reduced IT spending, Gavin Clarke writes.

The Scotts Valley, California-based company is preparing an integrated development suite called Borland .NET Development Environment, as an alternative to Microsoft Corp's Visual Studio.NET.

Borland .NET Development Environment was announced at the company's developer conference, where it was code-named Galileo.

Borland said yesterday its IDE would expand the current level of support for .NET, provided in Delphi 7.0 Studio. The Delphi 7.0 Studio, launched in August, can compile elements of an application to Microsoft's Common Language Runtime (CLR).

Borland's senior vice president of business development and chief strategy officer Tod Shelton told ComputerWire Delphi is just "one of the languages" the integrated development environment (IDE) would support. Shelton, though, was unwilling to say what other languages would also be featured.

Borland .NET Development Environment is also expected to support the next iteration of Microsoft's .NET Framework, codenamed Everett.

Shelton said Borland's IDE would work "extremely well" with the Microsoft products "that are in customers hands at the time." Borland .NET Development Environment is due in the first half of 2003 while Everett is scheduled for the first quarter of next year.

Shelton was upbeat about chances for customer uptake of Borland .NET Development Environment, discounting analysts' pessimism over short-term IT spending. He said IT spending has been "right sized" through the bursting of the dot-com bubble. Underlying "spending has been chugging along at an average rate," he said.

Customers are now focussed on application integration, which can be assisted by web services and Borland .NET Development Environment, Shelton said.

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