Now we’re not usually paranoid in these parts. In fact, you may have read the editor’s note on these pages last month discussing the various conspiracy theories rampant on the Internet. The day we sent that off to the printers, one of our editors looked out the window on the 18th floor of MIND House. What did she see? Unmarked black helicopters circling our building. We’re not making this up (and when we say that, we don’t say it in a Dave Barry way, as an intro to something that’s entirely made up—we really aren’t making this up).        Crazy, we know. But not as strange as this. On a recent staff trip to a children’s play club (which will remain nameless to avoid making any of its stockholders feel DZ), we made yet another remarkable discovery: scientists currently believe that the variation in influenza viruses from year to year is a result of the Chinese practice of raising pigs and ducks together, where new strains can jump from species to species. (We’re not making this up!) These researchers have obviously never seen the unbridled joy of a three-year-old child triumphantly emerging from a giant bouncy ball pit with a wad of newfound watermelon bubblegum in hand. Or the resulting series of chills, intestinal distress, and body aches that hits every other member of the family within a week. Except for the kid, who’s so bored of being housebound that he keeps begging to go back to the play club for some more roughhousing.        Anyway, with all this welcome post-outing bed rest, we’ve been able to do a lot of thinking. We got a good look at Microsoft Visual InterDev, formerly known as Internet Studio. In this month’s issue, you’ll find the lowdown on what could be the Internet product of the year. Again, we don’t mean "product of the year" in a Comdex luncheon awards ceremony sort of way. (You know, where a publisher names a Product of the Year award after one of its magazines and gives it to Microsoft one day, then gives another award, named after another one of its magazines, to Netscape the next day.) We mean that Visual InterDev could be among the most useful new developer products to appear in 1997.        For starters, it runs in the same integrated environment that now hosts Visual C++ and Visual J++, so you’re already up to speed with where to put the mouse. It not only lets you graphically edit HTML, and tie databases and server-side scripts to Web sites, but Visual InterDev also introduces design-time controls to the world. Design-time controls are, as the name implies, only available at design time. Through a COM interface, they can export HTML and text to a file when needed. References to them are stored in a file, commented out until the next time a suitable editor picks up the file. The HTML output is also marked so the editor can easily revise it at a later time. (We’re not making this up!)        Our second favorite innovation included with Visual InterDev is Music Producer. It’s irresistibly goofy/cool, if that’s the right combination of words. Using a knowledge of the structure of dozens of musical styles (from Dark Techno to Hijinks), you can create MIDI files based on an incredible array of moods (from Bittersweet to Manic) and band makeups (from Saxombone to One Man Band). You can set the music to an arbitrary tempo, fiddle with the key it’s played in, move the individual instruments from left to right and change their volumes, and even tell it to make a song suitable for endless looping. It’ll awake the Paul Williams in anyone (as if that’s a good thing)!        A final thought and we’ll leave you alone: imagine being one of those poor employees laid off by a struggling computer maker. You’re sitting there watching the football playoffs, and all you see are those "Santa and his elves kicking back" ads the company is now running. Not once, not twice, but about forty million times. (We’re not making this up!) Say you’d been making $50,000 a year. They’ve just taken the money they saved on you and reinvested it in the twelfth showing of the same damn ad within two hours. Not even a different version—the same exact ad! Oh well. At least the Cowboys lost. —J.T.

From the March 1997 issue of Microsoft Interactive Developer