This document was written to accompany the PDC Tech Preview of the NGWS SDK, and assumes you already have both the SDK and the associated PDC Tech Preview of Visual Studio 7.0. If you are working with later versions of either the SDK or Visual Studio, you will need to obtain an updated version of this document since many details of the underlying technology – particularly the names of the underlying objects and their members – are likely to have changed.
We will walk you through the process of developing several small programs that use the next generation of Visual Studio language tools to take advantage of the new NGWS framework and runtime. You will start with the simplest of programs – command-line versions of the traditional "Hello World" executable – in each of the three Visual Studio 7.0 languages:
These simple programs will introduce you to working with the new NGWS runtime as well as the process of developing for a managed environment where many common programming tasks – for instance, memory garbage collection (GC) and a rich class library – are already provided.
You will then be lead through the development of a small, componentized client/server application. This application shows a server DLL component – written in each of the three languages – being called from five different clients: Command-line applications for each of the same three languages, a Windows-enhanced client using the new WinForms library, and a Web server page utilizing a WebForm server control that demonstrates the new integration between Active Server Pages (ASP+), the NGWS framework and runtime, and the new language tools.