Microsoft Corp. today announced Microsoft® Visual Studio® for Applications (VSA), the first technology that delivers easy and widespread customization of Web applications. VSA provides corporations and ISVs that want to take full advantage of the business opportunities presented by the Web with the ability to tailor Web applications with specialized business logic. ISVs and corporations can easily integrate VSA customization technology into their homegrown and packaged distributed applications. This enables customers to use the familiar Visual Basic event driven model to customize core business logic running on the server without intimate knowledge of the application. By integrating VSA, ISVs and corporations can enable end users to customize those applications.

Visual Studio for Applications supports the writing of custom code using Visual Basic.NET, the next version of the world's most popular programming language. ISVs and corporations can rely on the more than 3 million developers working with the Visual Basic® development system worldwide. VSA has a language neutral architecture, and Visual Basic.NET is the first language to support VSA. In subsequent releases, other .NET languages will be able to plug into the VSA architecture.