Borland is expected to announce that Sidewinder, a rapid application development (RAD) environment built almost entirely on Microsoft Corp’s C Sharp programming language, will become Borland C Sharp Builder for the Microsoft .NET Framework.

The C Sharp Builder, Borland’s newest RAD tool, will be integrated with five existing Borland products covering the design, testing and deployment stages of application lifecycle management.

Testing is provided by CaliberRM, StarTeam and Together Control, testing by Optimizeit Profiler and deployment is made possible with Borland’s InterBase embedded database. C Sharp builder is expected this summer, with some support for Visual Basic.NET

Borland will make the announcement two days before partner and competitor Microsoft Corp launches the latest version of its own .NET development environment and deployment platform, Visual Studio.NET 2003 and Windows Server 2003.

Borland hopes to position C Sharp Builder against mighty Microsoft’s development suite as the independent choice for .NET developers who do not wish to buy-into Microsoft’s own .NET development tools and strategies.

Despite being roughly two-years behind the first version of Microsoft’s Visual Studio.NET, Borland believes that it has at least two key advantages over Microsoft. One is in specialist areas of application lifecycle management like source code management, considered outside the expertise of a platform vendor such as Microsoft.

By integrating design, testing and deployment, Borland believes it can offer .NET developers a one-stop-shop for programming, avoiding the need to search out and integrate tools that serve particular aspects of application lifecycle management on their own.

Borland will also appeal to developers building in mixed environments. Borland director of products and technology for RAD Michael Swindell said that typical users for Borland’s tool will be those integrating .NET on the client of web tier with Corba or Java on servers – tools in Borland’s stable also design and deploy to Java and Linux.

Source: Computerwire