Development Tools

One of the most important factors underpinning Microsoft's success has always been their fostering of the development community.

The company started off with development tools and had consistently led the way with creating powerful, yet easy to use tools.

Why is Microsoft by far the most successful development tools vendor?

Microsoft has consistently been successful in getting critical mass and momentum behind its tools due to a combination of:

Powerful capability
Ease of use
Value for money MSDN subscriptions
Excellent education resources
Comprehensive support
Huge partner ecosystem
Incorporation of latest standards.

So with each category and generation Microsoft has been by far the most successful tools vendor, including Visual Basic, Visual C++, ASP, and now C# (Visual Studio .Net). The latter is more successful than Java as a tool for generating the latest generation of applications.

This brings huge benefits to the end users, including:

Development resources easy to obtain at reasonable cost.
Huge availability of functionality
Integration between components developed by different developer is much easier if developed with the same toolset.
Huge community - using tools drives adoption of standards such as COM+, ADO.Net, Web Services, etc
Custom unique capability can be added to applications such as Dynamics quickly, cheaply and easily.

Dynamics Development

Dynamics GP core modules are written in Dexterity - a variant of Microsoft Visual C++ optimised for business applications. Newer modules such as Business Portal are written using C# / ASP.Net

Dynamics CRM is written from the ground up using C#

Both Dynamics GP and Dynamics CRM take full advantage of the Microsoft technology stack and are compliant with latest integration standards, such as Web Services.

Both Dynamics GP and Dynamics CRM can be extended and enhanced using Microsoft's latest and most powerful development toolset: Visual Studio .Net.