Rainer Mauth
Microsoft Solution Framework (MSF) is the company's answer to the requirements of large-enterprise computing. It's a reference guide to three-tier client/server development and a concept of building distributed applications using OLE controls. Until now, MSF has been a framework without concrete design rules and basic components. This situation is changing now that vendors are starting to build enterprise applications based on Windows NT and Windows 95.
"MSF doesn't unveil how to implement business processes or how to design components," says Michael Engel, product manager at Siemens Nixdorf, Inc.'s (SNI) applications software unit (Paderborn, Germany). "However, in the real world, developers need design standards." SNI is now porting its business man
agement platform Alx-Comet from its proprietary and Unix systems to Windows NT.
To implement the Alx-Comet business model, the company had to render the MSF skeleton. "Our goal was to create a cookbook for developers rather than a framework," explains Engel. SNI designed a library of OLE automation components for Visual Basic 4.0, including a code generator and a data dictionary.
The
new SNI environment
, code-named Merlin, allows developers to create a Visual Basic code skeleton with standardized event and error handling, user-interface (UI) properties, and Open Database Connectivity (ODBC). Thus, they can focus on implementing their business models. Merlin contains reference code and specifies how to tie UIs and underlying data services to a business management layer.
Beyond third-party developers of Alx-Comet branch solutions, Merlin will also be available to others. Microsoft plans to establish the SNI architecture as a standard for building large-scale business appl
ications under Windows and to sell it with MSF.
On the data-modeling side, there is another approach to give more life to MSF. Select Software Tools' (Cheltenham, U.K.) new rapid application development (RAD) tool, Select Enterprise for Visual Basic, combines Rumbaugh/OMT modeling and Jacobsen case techniques with OLE 2.0 and remote automation to design MSF-compatible client/server architectures. Select product manager Edward Holt says the modeling tool adds greater detail to the architectural and process frameworks of MSF and supports separate object models for each tier of a multitier application. It generates Visual Basic code.
SNI and Select plan to release their tools in the first quarter of next year.
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SNI's tools make it easier to develop MSF-compatible client/server applications for large enterprises. The tools automatically generate a Visual Basic code skeleton with event and error handling, UI properties, and database connectivity.
New Tools Pump Life into MSF
