ZogBlog

Visual Studio 2005 Team System Overview for Developers @ Reston

Originally posted: ZogBlog::road less traveled, on October 21st, 11:16p EST.

As some of you know, Check and I attended the latest partner dinner at Microsoft's Reston office last night. Here are my notes:

Presented by: Robert Sheldon (MCS Federal Developer Evangelist)

Upcoming Visual Studio 2005 editions (SKUs); expected release summer 2005:

• Visual Studio Express (< $100 - I'm guessing $20-$40; this is a limited version of VS that will come in various flavors for the hobbyist developers - Web Developer, VB.NET, etc)
• Visual Studio Team Architect (targeted at designers; will not include code editing but will include infrastructure and application modeling tools with network and design discovery)
• Visual Studio Team Developer (standard edition; will include visual Class designer, Object Test Bench, and modeling tools)
• Visual Studio Team Tester (designed for test; will include code analysis / code coverage tools, and various Test Driven Development features such as NUnit, NMock, etc)
• Visual Studio Enterprise Edition (includes all modules)
• Visual Studio Team Foundation Server (Server component that provides integrated backend technologies:
  • Distributed NUnit, NANT, NMOCK testing (Test Driven Development apps)
  • Change Management, Work Item tracking
  • Reporting (manager type progress & testing reports)
  • Windows SharePoint Services site provides new team management features
  • Project site extensions (?)
  • Unfortunately, Requirements Analysis will not be a part of this release

Cool Features of new Integrated Development Environment (IDE):

• Refactoring: modify a method name... and have VS fix all of the calls to it; select a bit of code, and extract it into a called method - all with a few simple mouse clicks.
• Edit and Continue: while debugging you can change a line of code, and then continue debugging without restarting to see the result
• Object Test Bench: instantiate a class, and test it - all from within the IDE (better yet, with edit and continue - you can edit a line of code and watch the object update itself!)
• Class Designers: Design your interfaces / APIs with visio like GUI, and then watch it build the code stubs (method/property/function declarations) for you.
• Logical Infrastructure & Solution Architect Designers: Build the constraints of your network design (firewalls, server locations in or out of the DMZ, define servers types, etc.) or build the application architecture (internal / external app interaction, ,).
• Design Discovery: the old Visio Design Discovery code is being built into VS 2005 to auto-magically build the logical infrastructure diagram for you!
• Web.Config will now have intellisense!

Cool features of ASP.NET 2.0

• Defaults changed from GridLayout to FlowLayout
• Defaults changed from code-behind to inline (though a tab still separates it in the designer)
• <asp:GridView >, DataGrid deprecated (though supported) and replaced with a BETTER datagrid. More info.
• <asp:DetailsView/>
• Master Pages!! Finally you can theme your site, and see it reflected on all pages at design time - without any additional code on the individual pages... just link your master page! More info.
• <asp:Region/> control
• <asp:Wizard/> Building workflow on a page, handle next/back, step1->n workflows easily now, simple XML allows you to reorder the steps if necessary, example.
• <asp:TreeView/>, more info.
• <asp:Menu/>, more info:
• <asp:Login/>, new authentication control
• Membership and Role Management Service: built-in support for managing user credentials (usernames/passwords) and role groups
• Personalization Service: enables you to define, save, and retrieve profile properties associated with users visiting your Web site. You can use the Personalization Service to permanently store user profile information without writing any data access code
• Site Navigation Service: You can represent the logical structure of a Web site by creating an ASP.NET "Whidbey" SiteMap. You create a SiteMap simply by creating an XML file that represents the relationships among all the pages in your application. Alternatively, you have the flexibility of retrieving a Site Map from a custom provider such as a database or content management system.
• <asp:SiteMapPath/> control with a SiteMap to automatically generate a bread crumb trail for your application
• <asp:WebPartZone/> and <asp:WebPart/> allows you to build a custom portal-like drag & drop UI (presumably in conjunction with the personalization service)

For more info, please see the new ASP.NET 2.0 Developer Center on MSDN.

posted @ Thursday, November 18, 2004 3:37 PM