Marks & Spencer is already using Microsoft's .Net software

Programs written to .Net specifications will readily grab information from internet-based sources or databases and present it to users or to other applications.

Many experts believe that only when these web services are widely used will the real potential of e-business be realised.

Businesses are likely to be the biggest users of web services. They will be tied together into live networks constantly trading information.

For instance, a .Net program that passes information about manufacturing problems or shortages at any point in a supply chain could instantly trigger automatic changes in the ordering or payment systems of all the companies in the chain.

One of the first companies to sign up to .Net is Marks & Spencer which has written a fraud detection program it hopes will help spot cloned or stolen credit cards.

Security hurdles

The Visual Studio software draws heavily on one of Microsoft's other popular programming tools, Visual Basic.

This already has more than six million users and, by tapping into this community, Microsoft hopes to build a large pool of .Net developers quickly.

It is also working to make it easy to translate software code written into other programming languages into the .Net format.

One of the main rivals to .Net is Java 2 Enterprise Edition (J2EE), backed by Sun Microsystems and based on the Java programming language.

While .Net applications will have an undoubted Microsoft flavour, they should produce data using the Extensible Markup Language (XML) format, potentially making it simple to interact with software written with rival programming tools.

Microsoft has significant hurdles to overcome. The security, reliability and trustworthiness of programs that tie together lots of different businesses and their customers will be paramount.