Compuware outlines strategic roadmap for Microsoft development solutions

Strengthens role as advisor for application development based on Microsoft technologies

Compuware Corporation has announced its continued support for Microsoft technologies, with plans to further integrate its award-winning DevPartner tools with Microsoft Visual Studio, focussing on legacy code support and migration, as well as on distributed application development.

This new level of integration is part of a comprehensive 12-month strategy for the Compuware DevPartner line of Microsoft developer solutions, which ensures ongoing support for developers and projects that are transitioning to .NET, while continuing support for older technologies.

Compuware is also strengthening its role as an advisor. DevPartner Studio has always complemented Visual Studio capabilities, providing value-added information to assist developers in improving coding practices and using memory and other resources efficiently. The company is now taking that approach much further with the analysis of a significantly broader range of factors affecting the reliability and security of applications. Compuware is significantly enhancing our ability to analyse applications and to provide actionable advice, delivering guidance on software development best practices in real-time in order to maximise application quality and performance.

"Compuware made this roadmap public because of significant changes occurring in the software development marketplace relating to the use of Microsoft technologies," said Rick Chau, Managing Director, Greater China for Compuware Asia. "First, enterprises have become more cognisant that application quality is critical to maintaining a competitive advantage, to rapidly entering new markets or at the very least to not losing money due to poor application quality.

"Second, Microsoft has announced that its next version of Visual Studio, Visual Studio 2005, will be available with a companion offering called Visual Studio Team System. This provides for a team approach to application development and testing, and includes features for improving code quality such as source code analysis, performance profiling, code coverage and unit testing."

Compuware will extend the DevPartner product line and deliver superior value to application development and testing teams using Microsoft technologies in the form of two new product offerings in the coming months. The launch of the next major release of Compuware DevPartner Studio Professional Edition will follow when Microsoft Visual Studio 2005 becomes generally available.

The first new addition to the DevPartner product line will provide comprehensive application security vulnerability analysis features that enable developers to quickly locate and fix both known and potential security vulnerabilities in Microsoft ASP.NET applications. This product will assist enterprises in developing, testing and deploying applications that are better able to withstand malicious attacks and data theft.

The second new addition to the DevPartner product line will provide a unique way for developers and testers to ensure high quality and reliability in application error-handling code, which is notoriously difficult to test during the application development life cycle. This product utilises fault simulation to emulate real world application errors. Developers will now have access to a predictable, repeatable environment to proactively analyse and debug their application's reaction to errors.

These new product offerings complement DevPartner Studio Professional Edition, the premier error detection and analysis environment for developers building complex mission-critical applications.

Compuware DevPartner Studio Professional Edition provides an award-winning suite of features that help software professionals accelerate the development of reliable, high-performance applications and components for Microsoft .NET as well as native Windows platforms. Building new .NET Framework-based applications that may integrate with native components may be prone to integration and migration problems, coding errors and poor performance, especially if those application components are distributed across multiple systems.

Compuware DevPartner Studio enables developers to locate errors early, to tune runtime performance and to assure thorough testing of applications written in Microsoft .NET, native code or a combination of the two.

The next release of DevPartner Studio Professional Edition will support development using Visual Studio 2005 and deliver the next generation of performance analysis, coupled with expert advice for improving application performance.

Compuware delivers comprehensive support for the Microsoft platform across the application life cycle not only with its DevPartner product line, but also with its QACenter product line for application quality assurance and with its Vantage product line for application service management.

About Compuware

Compuware Corporation (Nasdaq: CPWR) maximizes the value IT brings to the business by helping CIOs more effectively manage the business of IT. Compuware solutions accelerate the development, improve the quality and enhance the performance of critical business systems while enabling CIOs to align and govern the entire IT portfolio, increasing efficiency, cost control and employee productivity throughout the IT organization. Founded in 1973, Compuware serves the world's leading IT organizations, including more than 90 percent of the Fortune 100 companies. For more information about Compuware, please visit Compuware at http://www.compuware.com/.