(August 28, 2002) -- Rational Software has further expanded its "Extended Development Experience" by extending the reach of Rational XDE Professional with support for Microsoft Visual Basic .NET and ASP.NET.

Rational has also added more power to Rational XDE Professional with industry-first assisted modeling and multidimensional modeling support for Microsoft Visual Basic .NET and ASP.NET developers. The enhancements to Rational XDE Professional enable Microsoft Visual Basic .NET and ASP.NET developers to simplify and accelerate the creation of higher-quality business applications.

Rational's "Extended Development Experience" for Microsoft .NET developers provides a frictionless design and development environment. At its core is Rational XDE Professional: .NET Edition, which presents Rational's design and modeling capabilities inside Microsoft Visual Studio .NET to give the developer a single user experience. Rational XDE Professional also is integrated with Rational's complete life-cycle software development solution, and is augmented with the comprehensive and skill-building content on the Rational Developer NetworkSM.

Until now, developers creating complex business applications with Microsoft Visual Basic .NET and ASP.NET have had to use separate tools for visual design and development. This requires developers to switch between the Microsoft Visual Studio .NET integrated development environment (IDE) and other applications, making it more time-consuming and challenging to create code. Rational XDE Professional solves this problem by presenting itself to developers as a seamless part of the Microsoft Visual Studio .NET IDE

"Assisted Modeling" allows developers to model their application using native Microsoft Visual Basic .NET or ASP.NET terms and concepts. A developer can drag a language construct from the tool bar onto a UML class, and Rational XDE Professional will automatically generate the correct UML syntax for that construct. This automation helps developers realize the power of visual design and development with only a basic knowledge of UML. Assisted Modeling technology uniquely helps developers learn the UML naturally by enabling them to think "in code" and generate UML.

Unlike other tools that can only have one active model in the work space at a time, Rational XDE Professional supports multidimensional models by allowing multiple models to be active in Microsoft Visual Studio .NET at the same time.

Additional information is at www.rational.net.