According to Information Week, Microsoft will eventually tie all of its software development and Internet development software into the Visual Basic shell, making the upcoming Boston suite--due March 19th--short-lived. "The new plan is to integrate everything into the VB shell," says a source briefed last week on Microsoft's plan. "The VB environment is ActiveX- based; the forms, the controls, everything. They want to make everything ActiveX-based." Making the move to the Visual Basic shell, the story suggests, will allow Microsoft to standardize their Forms engine and componentize their languages. Should you believe this? No. If reports about Boston are true, this sort of standardization will occur in Developer Studio, the IDE used by Visual C++, Visual J++, Visual SourceSafe, MSDN, and Visual InterDev. If anything, I suspect that Visual Basic will be made to conform to the Developer Studio IDE, since VB is one of the few Boston tools that doesn't already do so. Such a move would not preclude a standardized Forms engine or language componentization. Unlike Developer Studio, the new VB5 environment is relatively untested and unfamiliar to most developers