On DevEnv day at the Microsoft Patterns and Practices Symposium 2010 an overview was given of the Microsoft Development Environment and many new features were demonstrated. Currently, I still use VC++ 6.0 so how could I not be impressed today. Ok, I already use Visual Studio 2010 as well, but there are still so many features that I did not see before. I am eager to use it in my next project.
The keynote of the day gave on overview of the Microsoft Developer Platform, which is meant to offer a complete platform for all development based on Microsoft technology. Be it client, server, browser, cloud or phone, it is all there. The three pillars of this platform consist of the Visual Studio, .NET and Expression. A powerful feature of Visual Studio is the fully integrated extension manager, that is used to download and manage Visual Studio extensions from the Visual Studio Gallery. More than a thousand extensions are already available there. The Productivity Power Tools extension is one you should definity look at. If you are using Scrum than the Scrum process template is another. Updates of extensions will be made available in the extension manager when available. At last also UML diagrams are supported in the IDE. Sequence and class diagrams can be generated from code and code can be generated from UML diagrams using standard or custom made templates.
In the second session a demonstration was given of the new tooling that can be used to guide developers in their work. So far, it seems that learning a new development environment today is still the same burden as it was in the days of Woodstock. But this may change with Automated Guidance integrated in Visual Studio 2010. Automated Guidance offers everything you need in one package to learn about a task or topic. It can offer guidiance for a complete working solution for a project (instead of code snippets), which can be anything such as a phone application or a cloud service. The package can contain direct guidance for the solution, other documents, online links and queries. The Visual Studio extension Feature Builder Power Tool can be used to to create your own guidance.
The last session of this year's symposium demonstrated process patterns in Visual Studio and Team Foundation Server. The main message of this talk was: that how earlier feedback is given about a mistake, how cheaper it is to solve it. Some possiblities to find mistakes early are static code analysis and validating architecture. Visual Studio 2010 has the possibility to create architecure diagrams consisting of packages. A package may for example be used as a layer of your architecture. Reference architectures are also available and can be customized. Classes can be assigned to a certain package. One-way or bidirectional associations between packages define for a package which other packages may be used. Assertion failures for code analysis and architecture validation can be configured to result in build warnings or errors. I would recommend to use at least warnings during build, and don't allow them during check-in.
This was the first time I visited the Microsoft Patterns & Practices Symposium and I really enjoyed it. Both the sessions and other events were good and well organized. I would love to come back next year.
Edwin van Schaick,
Software Architect, Capgemini.
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