Compuware will unveil two products ensuring that developers create secure and reliable applications.

At the Gartner Application Development Summit in Phoenix Tuesday, Compuware Corp. is expected to lay out its road map for delivering tools to support the Microsoft Corp. development environment.

Rob Straight, product manager for DevPartner products at Compuware in Nashua, N.H., said Compuware plans to outline its strategy to further integrate its tools with Microsoft's Visual Studio, specifically targeting Visual Studio 2005 and Visual Studio Team System.

"We talked a lot in the labs over the last 18 months about what kind of value we could add [around the Visual Studio platform], like reliability and identifying where there are problems and do performance enhancements," Straight said. Compuware planned to help developers on "where to go to make improvements to the code to make it better," and to enhance the company's DevPartner Studio to do code evaluation more thoroughly.

In that light, Compuware will be announcing two new products down the road. The first will ensure that the applications developers create are secure, Straight said. The new product, as yet not formally named, will perform security vulnerability analyses for applications being created in the ASP.Net environment.

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The second product, also unnamed, will be a new technology that "makes it very easy to simulate all the errors that could happen at runtime, but in an emulation mode," Straight said. This product is part of Compuware's focus on "extending the concept of creating reliable applications," he said. "It's hard to simulate errors that might occur at runtime."

Both products will ship early next year, before the release of Visual Studio 2005, Straight said. Microsoft has said Visual Studio 2005 is expected next summer.

Meanwhile, although Microsoft will be providing its own security vulnerability analysis software in the form of its PreFast and PreFix technology, those technologies are not targeted at ASP.Net, said Ken Cowan, product line manager for the Compuware DevPartner and DriverStudio product families.

"The Microsoft technology is designed to find bugs in native C and C++ applications, not for ASP.Net applications," Cowan said.

Compuware said the new products will complement the company's DevPartner Studio Professional Edition error detection and analysis product.

The Compuware road map involves delivering tools that help developers deal with integrating new and existing code and also delivers advice on best practices, the company said.

"Specifically, we're announcing our plans to prepare for the launch of Visual Studio 2005," Straight said.

"The new [Visual Studio] Team System concept does not mean that tools like DevPartner Studio are no longer viable," he said. "We'll have features and functionality they don't have. Microsoft has acknowledged they don't have the wherewithal to deliver everything," Straight said, noting that Compuware is a Microsoft Visual Studio Industry Partner. "We're a strong player in the Visual Studio 2005 and Team System world."

This article was first published on eweek.com.

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