This artile provides a summary of keynote and break out sessions I attended. Channel 9 coverage of the event is available here. Most of the new 2010 features were presented and demonstrated.
Major points of emphasis for the 2010 releases:
1. Stay in the Zone
The idea is to enable SW engineers to stay in context, maintain focus and minimize switching cost. This is accomplished by providing the features SW engineers need through their respective IDE:
- Visual Studio for developers
- Test and Lab Manager for testers
- Team Web Access, Office and SharePoint for program managers
2. SharePoint Made Easy
This consist of major enhancements to SharePoint and improved integration and support of SharePoint in SharePoint Designer, Visual Studio and Access. Particular features include:
- Simplified administration and configuration
- Near feature parity of SharePoint Online
- Visual Studio support for debugging and automated deployment
- SharePoint can be run on Windows 7 so that developers are not forced to use a server OS for their development computer
- Support for LINQ
3. Support for the Cloud
Cloud technology is seen as an inflection point that will change the landscape of software applications. Reasons given include
- The Cloud provides a 10x reduction in overall hardware costs. For example, the normal ratio of operators to servers 1 to 30. World class IT shops have achieved 1 to 300. The Cloud enables 1 to 3000.
- An order of magnitude improvement in support for scalability, elasticity, up-time and reliability
- Visual Studio 2010 features for making Cloud development easy and consistent with development of on-premise applications
4. Support for All Kinds of Devices
Extending support and deployment to all devices everywhere will create huge new opportunities for software applications.
- Windows 7 support to extend to many different devices so that the same bits can be deployed and run the same bits all kinds of different devices including phones, game boxes, and televisions
- Visual Studio 2010 provides the emulation and debug tools
- An “online application marketplace” where applications can be uploaded and then consumed by device users
5. Visual Studio Team Explorer Everywhere
Formerly Teamprise , this provides access to TFS from within a number of different IDEs on different platforms
6. Understanding the Code
This is supported by a number of new features including:
- Architecture Explorer, which provides visualizations of object/symbol relationships
- Reverse engineering of dependency diagrams and sequence diagrams
- Intellitrace, which is historical debugging (i.e. the time travelling debugger)
7. Less time in Status Meetings
- Team members mark work items closed and TFS consolidates and provides status reports
- Traceability is automatically maintained
- Team Web Access
- MS Office/TFS integration
8. Test Automation
- Test case steps and system information automatically written to the SAR
- Video, screen shots, Intellitrace and VM checkpoint automatically linked to the SAR
- Manual test execution recording and playback
- Automatic execution of unit tests, deployment and execution of coded UI tests
- Automatic selection of regression tests based on code changes (i.e. test impact analysis)
- Since November 09, SilverLight has increased its worldwide desktop install base from 45% to 60%
- The 4.0 release enables better application performance (2x), faster startup (30%) and new performance profiling support
- Applications can extend beyond the browser and can be deployed to all kinds of devices
- Develop applications that support multiple monitors
- Presentation of SilverLight 4.0 developed product, Ormetis
- Presentation of the SilverLight 4.0 pivot control for deep zoom and analytical processing
- Easy access to data via WCF services
Session Consolidation
Team Foundation Server (TFS)
- VS/TE 2010 backward compatible to TFS 2008
- VS/TE 2005 forward compatible to TFS 2010
- Other compatibility scenarios
- Team Build now driven by Windows Workflow (WF) 4.0
- 2008 build definitions can run as-is in TFS2010 using the Upgrade Template on the expanded process tab of the build defintion
- Can support parallel builds
- Gated check-in and buddy builds
- "Test impact analysis" to drive selective execution of unit tests and coded UI tests locally and as part of the build "deployment" workflow
- Branching visualization for change-sets by path and by time-sequence
- Use a proxy TFS server for builds to take transaction load off the main TFS server
Talmia
I met with the Talmia team and participated in a demonstration of Talmia's process design and implementation features. Talmia is an ALM process control product. It provides event-driven workflows that can be implemented into TFS as part of the TFS Process Template.
Visual Studio 2010
- To use VS 2010, projects and solutions must be converted to the 2010 format. This is permanent and once performed these files cannot be read by VS 2008
- 2010 projects can target .Net 4.0 or 3.5 or 3.0 or 2.0: solutions can have projects targeting different platform versions
- VS now very much easier to extend and customize (Managed Extensibility Framework)
- Keyboard shortcuts are now displayed on the right-click context menus. The full list of 2010 keyboard shortcuts is here. Some nifty ones presented at the conference are:
- Zoom code editor - Ctl + mouse wheel
- Multi-line editing - Alt, select
- Redock a floating tab - Ctl + double-click
- Bring up the quick "Navigate To" dialog - Ctl + comma
- The new architecture "analysis" features will identify and display:
- Circular references
- Un-referenced nodes
- Hubs
SharePoint
- Development for SharePoint 2010 now much more consistent with the development of ASP.NET applications
- The SharePoint sever is now listed in the VS Server Explorer
- Improved SharePoint designer; for example, organizes information in logical categories instead of by file path
- Support for offline work and automatic sync once online
- Ability to pull data from multiple sources to display in a SharePoint web part
- Active Access databases can be published to SharePoint and can continue to be updated natively and through SharePoint
- List can now contain up to 50 million items (enabled through a new query throttling feature)
- SharePoint 2010 and Office 2010 planned for release on May 12th
- Sandbox solutions provide more control within defined boundaries
- Full set of hands-on training exercises and labs available and download-able SharePoint 2010 virtual environment
SilverLight
- SilverLight 4.0 extends beyond the browser; supports RIA and local data
- Much improved ease of integration with MS Office applications (don't always have to ship the office interops)
- New Expression Blend 4 improved integration with other development tools (i.e. VS and SilverLight)
- Fast end-to-end application with Sketch-Flow, Expression Blend, SilverLight, WCF/RIA Services and SQL Server
- New features to ease and accelerate development of applications using parallel processing (for example, the VS concurrency visualizer)
C# .Net 4.0
- Things you get and can do without upgrading to .NET 4:
- Improved Intellisense:
- Finds not only with the leading string, but any substring and even acronyms (i.e. TDI will find TestDataImpact)
- Support for JQuery
- Multi-monitor support (VS tabs can be "torn off" and displayed as a stand alone window on a different monitor)
- New code search feature "Navigate To" for a quick find of symbols and objects (Ctl + comma)
- Some new .NET 4 features
- Improved sevrer control rendering
- SEO friendly routing
- Better client-side development support
- Granular view state control
- Rich charting visuals and chart control
- Easier decoupling of the URL from the file path name
- More efficient translation of markup into code
- Access data like you access code (WCF and Entity Framework)
- The 2010 .Net 4 deprecation list (~300 items)
- Language features: dynamic language support, contracts, performance analysis at the application domain level, improved garbage collection, named and optional parameters, easier interface with COM (i.e. embedded interop types)
