The East Windsor, N.J., company released its information at the Microsoft TechEd 2004 conference here, featuring Mark Driver, a vice president of the Stamford, Conn.-based Gartner Inc. market research firm; Rick LaPlante, director and general manager of enterprise tools at Microsoft; and Dean Guida, chief executive of Infragistics.

At the conference, Microsoft is expected to announce its strategy to help developers focus on the entire application lifecycle. In addition to delivering key core technology to provide support across the development lifecycle, Microsoft will be calling on partners to assist in providing the overall solution.

For a TechEd overview, click here.

Infragistics is one such partner, with its suite of presentation layer development tools.

Gartner's Driver said work on presentation layer aspects of system development can account for between 25 percent and 40 percent of the time spent building applications. And Guida said Infragistics' components can help developers recoup some 25 percent or more of that lost time by delivering reusable components.

LaPlante, who was prominent in the video, discussed the importance of standardization of tooling at the presentation layer level and the strategy behind the new Microsoft team system.

"The more you standardize on the presentation layer, the more productive the development team is going to be," LaPlante said.

Among the announcements Microsoft is expected to make at the conference is Microsoft Visual Studio Team System, which is intended to address team development.

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For more on Microsoft's Visual Studio Team System, click here.

"We wanted to expand the platform to focus on team development and also to focus on communication between disparate members of the development team" located in different places, LaPlante said.

LaPlante added that he believes the new team-focused tool will have a "substantial impact" on software development in the Microsoft environment.

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