Microsoft Programming Environments

Microsoft® Visual Studio® includes the major Microsoft development systems: Microsoft Visual Basic®, Microsoft Visual C++®, Microsoft Visual J++®, Microsoft Visual InterDev™, and Microsoft Visual FoxPro®.

These systems support the development of Microsoft Windows® and Web-based applications. Microsoft SQL Server™ supports the database application programming interfaces (APIs) used by these and other languages when building applications that store their data in a database: ADO, OLE DB, ODBC, Embedded SQL, and legacy APIs such as DB-Library. SQL Server 2000 also supports accessing instances of SQL Server through Uniform Resource Locators (URLs), and processing data in the form of XML documents.

In addition to being familiar with the use of Transact-SQL, programmers must understand how the database API interacts with Transact-SQL. They must understand how to supply data values for parameters, and how to move the data values in a result set into variables in their applications.

Internet application programmers must also understand how to work with SQL Server 2000 data as XML documents. For more information, see XML and Internet Support Overview.