Thursday 12 September 1996. ComponentSource today announced a partnership with Microsoft to include its componentware CDs with all new copies of Visual Basic (English International version) sold in Europe.

The new initiative is designed to give developers instant accessibility to the largest range of commercial software components available. Visual Basic users can now choose from an electronic æsupermarketÆ of third party, re-usable components. Each can deliver powerful functionality to corporate and software house IT solutions in a fraction of the time and cost taken to write the same software from scratch.

The CD includes hundreds of software components from leading vendors World-Wide, saving time for developers, who previously had to spend weeks looking for products.

A credit card or purchase order number and a telephone is all that is needed to unlock a required component directly from the ComponentSource CD.

The first copies of Visual Basic to ship with ComponentSource CDs are due to role out in September and will be despatched throughout Europe.

" We believe including the ComponentSource CDs together with Visual Basic will offer better choice, accessibility and a more practical format to developers looking to incorporate third party components into their programs." says Andrew King, Marketing Manager for the Developer Customer Unit at Microsoft.

"The imminent arrival of Visual J++ and the arrival of Visual Basic 5.0, will provide the ability to produce re-usable, ActiveX components at the click of a button. This will further boost the growth of the component market, estimated to rise in value from $250m today, to over $2 billion* within the next 3 years."

Behind this rapid growth, is the increased adoption of component based programming by corporate and software businesses. More and more companies are being attracted by the significant savings in time and money gained by building solutions from re-useable software.

Users of the CDs will have free access to information and demonstrations on the latest available component products. Uniquely, the full retail versions of the products have also been encrypted onto the CDs, and in exchange for payment details, ComponentSource will issue an un-lock key that deciphers and downloads the product in a matter of seconds.

A user friendly browser especially designed to make selecting components as easy as possible, allows developers to view products by business category, product name and component vendor.For example there are 50 categories of components including : Artificial intelligence, installation tools, database tools, graphing tools, grid controls and text controls.

Within the categories there are over 250 components to choose from. These range from language specific VBXÆs to 16 and 32 bit OCXÆs to the latest generation of independent, multi-platform and extendible ActiveX controls. For example, VSFLEX a leading grid control from US based VideoSoft, NetPak Professional from Crescent - Division of Progress Software, and Graphics Server from European company Bits Per Second.

ComponentSource CDs are also available to all other European software developers free of charge. To receive regular CDs developers should call the companyÆs express registration service on +44 (0) 118 958 1111. Alternatively, information and registration is available on the ComponentSource web site: http://www.componentsource.co.uk

ComponentSource is a UK based company specialising in the supply of software components, companion products and add-ons. It is the first company to offer component vendors secure encryption of their full retail products on a freely distributed CD-ROM aimed specifically at component users.