Tim Anderson's ITWriting

July 11, 2004

Borland Together vs Microsoft Team System

I've just written a piece on Microsoft's Visual Team System for Application Development Advisor; unfortunately the article is not online unless you subscribe to the magazine. However, even subscribers won't have seen the comments from Karl Frank, Borland's Principal Architect for Together Products, since it had to be omitted for space reasons. Borland recently released Together for .NET 2.0, a Visual Studio add-in that provides UML modelling with two-way code synchronisation as well as software auditing, refactoring, and pattern implementation. The new release supports Visual Basic as well as C#. I asked Karl how Microsoft's entry into the modelling market would impact the Together range.

"Microsoft has got a very large following. Now we have Steve Ballmer showing static analysis and modelling as something that users should be looking forward to. That gives me an opening to say, 'We have it. It's been validated by Mr Ballmer himself.'"

But could Microsoft snaffle up the entire market for itself? "They have given us a year to establish a foothold. And in that year we will be providing something which they undoubtedly will never provide. We're a platform independent vendor. By providing a UML standard approach to modelling we are providing import-export capabilities through XMI with the rest of the modelling world. That will give Borland users the ability to leverage models they have already created. It's clear that Microsoft is not going to do standard UML. There's an interesting parallel between what Microsoft is doing here and the Eclipse platform. From our perspective we would like to keep up the parity. We have to play both sides."