Epicor Software Corporation, a leading provider of integrated enterprise and eBusiness software exclusively for midmarket companies, today announced it is incorporating Microsoft Visual Studio for Applications into the e by Epicor suite of products. The integration, which is an extension of Epicor`s current VBA support, will provide Epicor`s customers with the industry standard development environment to easily extend, customize and integrate e by Epicor with Web applications. e by Epicor with VSA support will increase productivity by providing a fully integrated way for customers to seamlessly customize and extend the functionality of Web-based applications using familiar tools. By enabling customers to add business rules using the Visual Studio.NET language, e by Epicor will be positioned to offer more flexibility, ease of use and customization than what is currently available from other midmarket enterprise vendors.
"Microsoft is very pleased to have Epicor as an early adopter of Visual Studio for Applications," said Robert Green, Visual Studio lead product manager at Microsoft Corp. "The e by Epicor suite is an industry leading enterprise and e-business solution, and adding Visual Studio for Applications will enable Epicor`s customers to tailor e by Epicor to the evolving needs of their businesses."
VSA is Microsoft`s new technology for customizing and extending the functionality of distributed applications to fit the specific needs of individual customers. VSA provides an unprecedented level of customization of middle-tier objects, a distributed engine for lightweight runtime and rich design-time environments, easy integration into distributed applications, all of the power of the Visual Basic.NET language, and the familiar IDE of Visual Studio.NET. Web applications can be customized harnessing the power of Microsoft .NET in an environment with tools customers are already comfortable with.
"Visual Studio for Applications integration will provide a great advantage to our customers, giving them even greater flexibility to tailor e by Epicor to their business processes and to the Web," said John Hiraoka, senior vice president of marketing and business development for Epicor. "This integration continues our long tradition of integration with, and support for the most current Microsoft technology."
Features of VSA Integration
Epicor is utilizing the following new capabilities of VSA for its e by Epicor customers:
Seamless, integrated customization - VSA is integrated directly into the application and delivered as part of the product offering.
Full power of Visual Basic - Developers can customize VSA-enabled applications using Visual Basic.NET. VSA is built with a language neutral architecture and future versions will support additional .NET languages.
Scalable, secure custom solutions - VSA is optimized to run in a Web environment. Based on the .NET framework, developers can write customizations that scale with the application.
Standards-based technology - Developers can easily integrate with XML and Web Services.
End-to-end customization - Customized business logic can be accessed from virtually any device, including rich Windows clients, browsers, mobile devices and Web enabled cell phones.
Multi-level customizations - VSA-enabled applications support multiple levels of customization. Developers can tailor an application at company, division, department and user-specific levels.
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