Microsoft Corporation has decided to increase the number of software developers and architects working on the .Net technology in the country following a good response to the web framework in the country.
.Net is a web services platform based on extensible markup language (XML) that lets developers write programs which need to inter-operate. Instead of writing applications with particular hardware or operating systems in mind, programmers write software for .Net.
"Of the more than 5,000 .Net projects worldwide currently, over 240 are being outsourced to large Indian system integrators including Infosys, Satyam, Wipro and Tata Consultancy Services. Today, we can say that India is a vanguard of .Net successes the world over," Dilip Mistry, director -.Net and developer evangelism told reporters on the sidelines of Microsoft's pact signing ceremony with the Jawaharlal Nehru Technological University in Hyderabad on Monday.
As part of the ramp-up, the corporation plans to expand its interface with all the four active partners of its exercise - system integrators, enterprises, independent service vendors and academia.
The company has about 2,500 software architects in the country after launching its software architect programme a year back.
The company has also identified about 1.5 lakh developers working on the .Net technology in the country. The latest project to go live on .Net was the London Congestion Charging project, which was developed by Mastek.
Bharat Petroleum also has an application implemented using the framework. For the academic community the first .Net solution Lyceum was launched by PacSoft Solutions - a small product development company, Mistry cited some recent developments. Microsoft's Hyderabad development centre, which employs about 200 people, focuses on delivering .Net related solutions.
There are about 2.5 million developers using Visual Studio .Net worldwide while over 10,000 licenses of the product are in use in India - the second highest in Asia.
More than 200 independent solution vendors are currently developing solutions using VS .Net and the .Net framework. Twenty of them have already introduced commercial applications, he further said.
Explaining the roadmap of developing and commercialising the .Net framework since the introduction of the vision about three years ago, Mistry said currently seamless integration and interoperability between applications is progressing.
The next phase, named Ucon, will focus on migrating database systems to XML format, followed by file storage being transformed to XML format.
Then begins the "New Battle" between technology major including Sun Microsystems and Microsoft on whose technology will dominate over others, he predicted.
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