Microsoft Announces the Next Generation of Visual Studio

Posted by Abel Avram on Sep 30, 2008 04:58 AM

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Microsoft has unveiled Visual Studio 2010 and .NET Framework 4.0.

The next generation of development tools from Microsoft will be called simply Visual Studio 2010, and will be based on .NET Framework 4.0, according to Norman Guadagno, Director of Product Management for Visual Studio Team System. An important part of it will be Application Life-cycle Management (ALM), a solution for better integration of developers into the application development cycle. According to MSDN, VS 2010 includes the following new functionality:

• Discover and identify existing code assets and architecture with the new Architecture Explorer.
• Design and share multiple diagram types, including use case, activity and sequence diagrams.
• Improve testing efforts with tooling for better documentation of test scenarios and more thorough collection of test data.
• Identify and run only the tests impacted by a code change easily with the new Test Impact View.
• Enhanced version control capabilities including gated check-in, branch visualization and build workflow.

The future VS version will be based on a new set of modeling tools, which support both Unified Modeling Language and Domain Specific Language, and will include Architecture Explorer:

The new Architecture Explorer in Visual Studio Team System gives developers and architects the capability of creating a full architectural picture of existing code; understanding how they fit together; understanding how they “work.”

One tool that is supposed to help fixing the bugs that cannot be reproduced is Test Runner:

This tool – the Microsoft Test Runner – is a standalone tool that a tester uses to guide them through a series of steps to complete a test case. When the test case is started the Microsoft Test Runner takes a snapshot of the system data, including OS version and Service Pack and other pertinent system data. As the test is being run the tester can use the tool to capture images of the application under test, or even partial or full screen video of the test being run. If an issue is discovered, the tester can create a new bug in Team Foundation Server and attach these artifacts. When attached, the screen capture video is fully indexed with the test steps as bookmarks, making it easier for the developer to see what went wrong on the tester’s machine.

Another feature is the Test Impact View window which "enables a developer to view a list of tests that need to be run as the result of a code change." The purpose of this feature is to assist the developer in running a complete set of tests which would show if the code change is safe to be checked-in.

Microsoft affirms that teams using Team Foundation Server (TFS) will be able to "adopt any flavor of Agile development process". Also, VSTS 2010 will unify Development and Database into one product. More information is available on Channel 9, the press release, and MSDN.

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   Portability

   Sep 30, 2008 1:12 PM by Ali Motaz

   Kinda OT, I am a fan of few MS productds, mainly their BI stack SSAS,SSIS and SSRS. My main complaint would be portability. You Need SQL Server and Windows OS as a requirement to use these tools. Same, applie to Visual and the .Net framework, I really hope that MS would consider, making all these portable to other OSes , mainly the SQL Server and BI stack!

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