Today is a big day for the Dutch developer community: we are launching Visual Studio 2010! Visual Studio is so much more than a developer tool today: you can create UML diagrams, visually analyze your source code, plan agile projects and iterations and reproduce complex bugs. All of this works in an enterprise environment where multiple development teams and many users share the same platform. Installation has been simplified and administration too. However, the biggest investments have gone to test and lab capabilities: the testing features are great so now your manual and functional testers get great tools too. Lab management expands the testing features in a sense that you can create virtual machines as clients for your applications and you can create snapshots of bugs and test runs, which developers can simply resume and take over for debugging.

Recently Ewald Hofman and I presented two sessions at the Microsoft Application Platform Conference. Gerard van der Pol envisaged an ALM Showcase track in which all phases of a development project would be presented. 

Yesterday and today we repeated this concept in a slightly different form. Together with Marcel, Edward, Hassan, Clemens, Rob, Rene and Gerard we had a lot of fun doing the interactive sessions.

11:10 - Planning the Showcase Application

13:30 - Modeling the Showcase Application

15:05 - Developing the Showcase Application

16:30 - Building the Showcase Application

09:15 - Planning, Design and Developing the Showcase Application (Recap Day 1)

10:50 - Using Version Control

13:15 - Selecting an Optimal Branch and Merge Strategy

14:50 - Performance testing

16:15 - Testing the Showcase Application

The most important part was to co-present the sessions: so there is a presenter and a code monkey who does the demos and presents where necessary. I think this made the sessions more attractive to the audience since there was continuous presenting and demos. Hopefully the audience enjoyed it too.

And it was an honor to share an agenda and speakers room with Anders Hejlsberg and Scott Hanselman!

Cameron Skinner blogged about this cool new vsix: It combines the reference architectures from Microsoft Patterns & Practices Application Architecture Guide with the new layered diagram features in Visual Studio 2010.

Just download the vsix from here and open it to install it to your Visual Studio 2010 RC. Then create a layered diagram in a new or existing solution, open the toolbox and there you have five new templates:

• Mobile Application
• Rich Client Application
• Rich Internet Application
• Services Application
• Web Application

which you can just drag and drop to the design surface to create a fully AppArch compliant solution from scratch. In the above screenshot you can see the Rich Internet Application template, that I used. How cool is that. I expect a lot more extensions to the diagrams in the months to come.

New on Microsoft downloads this week is the Visual Studio 2010 and .NET Framework 4 training kit.

It contains 151 MB of techie goodness such as demos, labs, presentations and videos.

If you want, you can even turn it into a 3-day workshop as the included agenda suggests:

Day 1

Lap Around Visual Studio 2010

PPT: What's New In Visual Studio 2010

Lap Around .NET Framework 4

PPT: Whats New In .NET Framework 4

Managed Languages Overview (C#/VB)

PPT: What's New In C# 4 and Visual Basic 10

Entity Framework 4

PPT: Whats New In Entity Framework 4

ADO.NET Data Services 1.5

PPT: Whats New In ADONET Data Services 1.5

Velocity

PPT: Introduction to Project "Velocity"

Silverlight 3

PPT: Not included in the kit

Day 2

ASP.NET 4

PPT: Whats New In ASP.NET Web Forms 4

AJAX 4

PPT: Whats New In ASP.NET AJAX 4

Web Deployment with Visual Studio 2010

PPT: Web Deployment with Visual Studio 2010

Windows Presentation Foundation 4

PPT: What's New in Windows Presentation Foundation 4

.NET RIA Services

PPT: Introduction to .NET RIA Services

Managed Extensibility Framework

PPT: Introduction to the Managed Extensibility Framework

Day 3

WF/WCF 4

PPT: Workflow 4: A First Look

Parallel Computing with Visual Studio 2010

PPT: Parallel Computing with Visual Studio 2010

Parallel Computing for Managed Developers

PPT: Parallel Computing for Managed Developers

Visual Studio Team System 2010

These are short modules that can be picked based on the interest of the audience.

PPT: Introduction: Visual Studio Team System 2010

PPT: No More Planning Black Box

PPT: No More Late Surprises

PPT: No More Stakeholder Surprises

PPT: No More Parallel Development Pain

PPT: No More Bewildering Admin

PPT: No More No Repro

Visual Studio Team System 2010

PPT: No More Build Breaks

PPT: No More Butterfly Effect

PPT: No More UI Regressions

PPT: No More Missed Requirements or Changes

PPT: No More Waiting for Build Setup

PPT: No More Performance Regressions

VSTS Rangers are a team of very active MVPs and other experts, such as Inner Circle partners, that are dedicated to improve the ease of use and adoption of Visual Studio Team System. Willy-Peter frequently blogs about the projects these guys are working and their progress.

Recently they released Quick Reference Guidance for Visual Studio 2010 on codeplex, which I think is very valuable. Go check it out:

http://vs2010quickref.codeplex.com/

“The Visual Studio 2010 Quick Reference Guidance consists of compact cheat sheets for Team Foundation Server (TFS) 2010 and Visual Studio (VS) 2010, addressing the core problem of teams in the field who are unaware of Visual Studio and Team Foundation Server capabilities or have little time to invest in detailed education.
The artifacts include an overview document and poster that allows you to quickly focus on individual areas like testing, by providing crisp and compact guidance sheets and quick reference posters. You can take these to your 5-min coffee break discussions or use them as a stepping stone to the more detailed and in-depth guidance you will find on MSDN.
The download package consist of three ZIP files containing a number of quick reference posters and quick reference sheets in XML Paper Specification (XPS) format:

• An overview of the guidance and focus areas, contained in one index table and overview quick reference poster.
• A collection of basic guidance sheets, focusing on the “what” are the key features and “why” to consider them.
• A set of documents and quick reference posters, supporting the basic guidance sheets.”

This is one of my start pages: http://www.microsoft.com/downloads/en/resultsForCategory.aspx?nr=50&sortOrder=Descending&sortCriteria=Date&period=30&stype=ss_nd&sterm=All+Categories 

It is a great start of the day as it prompts you all new downloads at MS Downloads. As you can see in the listing below, the Visual Studio team have updated the VSTS 2008 VMs. On top of that you can also get the 2010 Beta 2 version in a ready to go VM.  Pretty cool, right? Brian Keller posted about the latter and he also provides an easy way to download the GBs and how to get the hands-on-labs. So if you have some time to burn this week, check them out.

Microsoft® Visual Studio® 2010 and Team Foundation Server® 2010 Beta 2 for Windows Virtual PC Image

Microsoft Visual Studio 2010 Ultimate simplifies solution development, lowering risk and increasing return. The virtual machine image in this download contains both Microsoft Visual Studio 2010 Beta2 and Team Foundation Server 2010 Beta2 and is designed to be run under Windows Virtual PC.

12/24/2009
Microsoft Visual Studio 2010 Beta 2 and Team Foundation Server® 2010 Beta 2 Hyper-V Image

Microsoft Visual Studio 2010 Ultimate simplifies solution development, lowering risk and increasing return. The virtual machine image in this download contains both Microsoft Visual Studio 2010 Beta2 and Team Foundation Server 2010 Beta2 and the requisite trial software. Designed to be run from Microsoft® Hyper-V

12/24/2009
Visual Studio 2010 Beta 2 Virtual PC SP1 Image

Microsoft Visual Studio 2010 Ultimate simplifies solution development, lowering risk and increasing return. The virtual machine image in this download contains both Microsoft Visual Studio 2010 Beta2 and Team Foundation Server 2010 Beta2 and the requisite trial software. Designed to be run from Microsoft® Virtual PC 2007 SP1.

12/24/2009
Visual Studio® Team System 2008 VSTS Hyper-V Image (Trial)

Microsoft Visual Studio 2008 is the next-generation development tool for Windows Vista, the 2007 Office System, and the Web.

12/23/2009
Visual Studio® Team System 2008 VSTS VPC Image (Trial)

Microsoft Visual Studio 2008 is the next-generation development tool for Windows Vista, the 2007 Office System, and the Web.

12/23/2009
Visual Studio® Team System 2008 TFS SP1 VPC Image (Trial)

Visual Studio Team System 2008 Team Foundation Server SP1 is an integrated collaboration server for Visual Studio Team System.

12/23/2009
Visual Studio® Team System 2008 TFS Hyper-V Image (Trial)

Visual Studio Team System 2008 Team Foundation Server is an integrated collaboration server for Visual Studio Team System.

12/23/2009

How time flies! Last year I presented Modelling in VSTS Rosario with demos in CTP12. Since then Microsoft have moved on: The product is now called Visual Studio Team System 2010 and we are at Beta2 already.

For the past few weeks I have used my rare spare time to get to know the Beta2 release. I already liked Beta1 a lot and this is even better. Sure there is room for improvement, which you can express here, but I can advise both VS as well as TFS to anyone for production use.

My session is called “New in VSTS2010” and there is much more content such as Surface development, ASP.NET security and ADO.NET Entity Framework. If you want to get the guided tour around VSTS2010 make sure to attend Codecamp in Rotterdam on November 21st.

Hogeschool Rotterdam
Locatie Academieplein 
G.J. de Jonghweg 4 - 6
3015 GG Rotterdam

My first public appearance about Visual Studio Team System was with Dennis Mulder in June 2005. After a few more years of community exposure I received the MVP Team System reward, which I consider a great honor.

Back then the presentation was about source control in VSTS 2005. It is great to see the progress in VSTS 2008 that the discussion is now way beyond version control. And the story continues as the eminent VSTS 2010 Beta2 release will prove.

It is going to be a very promising year for VSTS. And it feels great to be a part of it.

PS: You can see my fellow MVPs here.

Here it is! Visual Studio Team System and Team Foundation Server 2010 Beta 1 as well as .NET Framework 4.0 Beta 1 have been released to the public. Soma made the announcement of the release to MSDN on Monday, but now all the goods are available to everyone too.

We have been involved in the Technical Adoption Program since early 2008 and it has been a great ride. Lots of good information has been tried and shared and earlier this year the TAP partners presented on VSTS 2010 during the APO Conference.

The VSTS installation experience is pretty straightforward: When you start the setup, select to install VSTS 2010.

Click next.

Accept the license agreement.

Select the .NET Development Environment.

Optionally click the Customize button to select components to install.

Click Next to start the installation.

The setup prompts to restart your machine after the .NET Frameworks have been installed. And so it does again after the installation is complete.

And then your favorite development environment is ready to be used! Select your environment settings.

The new start page.

And the new layout for project and file types.

Oh, and I am sure you noticed the new user interface in Windows Presentation Foundation.

Except for the startup performance I love every bit of it.

Now we are looking forward to using VSTS and TFS in a managed production environment.

On March 13 there is an Application Platform Optimization conference in the Netherlands. Clemens, Marcel and I will talk about Visual Studio Team System 2010 in the development track on testing, architecture and work item tracking respectively. The other tracks are data management/business intelligence and SOA/business process. The conference day before will be focused on the same topics but is intended for managers and technical decision makers. Even though the agenda is not complete yet, it looks to be a promising event with presentations by:

• Kevin Ashby - Enterprise Platform Modernization, Microsoft
• Ofer Ashkenazi - Sr. Technical Product Manager, Microsoft
• Sam Guckenheimer - Group Product Planner Visual Studio Team System, Microsoft

New versions of my favorite products are being released later this year: BizTalk 2009 and Visual Studio Team System 2010. Obviously I am very excited to see interesting Microsoft speakers make it to the conference. If you can not wait to learn more about Visual Studio Team System 2010 below are a few links where you can get to know the product a little more:

http://channel9.msdn.com/posts/VisualStudio/Visual-Studio-Team-System-2010-Week-on-Channel-9/ 
http://channel9.msdn.com/VisualStudio/
http://channel9.msdn.com/shows/10-4/

Later next month I am presenting at Software Developer Network event. That talk will be on the Application Architecture Guide 2.0 which I discussed in a recent post.

Recently Microsoft Patterns & Practices released an updated version of the Application Architecture Guide. This guide is an invaluable source of information for anyone creating .NET applications. If you are looking for ways to structure your application, for challenges of specific application types or for non-functional requirements, you should read this document. Below is a fragment of the introduction: 

“The purpose of the Application Architecture Guide 2.0 is to improve your effectiveness when building applications on the Microsoft platform. The primary audience for this guide is solution architects and development leads. The guide provides design-level guidance for the architecture and design of applications built on the Microsoft .NET platform. It focuses on the most common types of applications and on partitioning application functionality into layers, components, and services, and also walks through their key design characteristics.”

The document consists of 387 pages, which may seem big. If there is just one thing you should take away from the guide, I would say it is the following diagram. It is the reference architecture of a general application that has layers for presentation, services, business and data logic. It also connects to data sources and other services and has cross-cutting concerns like security and operations.

Immediately after the guide appeared Clemens wrote a great post about AppArch guide 2.0 and Visual Studio 2010. Since I realized that most are now working in Visual Studio 2008, I thought I would create some visuals in the current technology. So to start I created a new solution and added an Application Diagram that would contain all elements. Normally when designing top-down you create a conceptual design, which you can also do by adding a System Diagram as the conceptual design and for each of the elements on your conceptual design add other System Diagrams. The below image is what you end up with: A diagram in Visual Studio that contains all your layers of the above reference architecture.

In each of the system diagrams that represent the layers you can now add components from the reference architecture. For instance add service interfaces and message types to the services layer. For the presentation it could look like this.

Normally you can not add Class Libraries to diagrams. To be able to use the red shape, you can use power tools for VSTS Architecture Edition, which were developed for Beta2 but they work fine in Visual Studio 2008 RTM and SP1.

When you are done your application diagram will look similar to this. I think this approach is great to create levels of abstraction: The diagram containing the layers describes how you separate layers and the application diagram shows the actual projects.

When you right-click on the application diagram you can select “implement all applications”, which will generate projects and references for all items in the diagram. Your solution is now almost done. The one thing missing compared to the reference architecture is the cross-cutting concerns, for which you can use Enterprise Library. Enterprise Library is a great framework that takes care of plumbing for caching, data access, etc.  Just add EntLib, or your preferred framework, to your solution and you are ready to go. Remember, if you have any questions, check out the AppArch guide and the knowledge base.

Good news: Today Microsoft announced the next version of Visual Studio Team System, previously known as "Rosario", will be called VSTS 2010. Some good information can be found on in Somasegar's post and in the official press release. In short the message is that Application Lifecycle Management will be taken to the next level to better facilitate architects, testers and project managers, but also new audiences such as application maintenance people. I am sure you know that Microsoft are very open in developing new products and receiving feedback, so you can already enjoy an early "Rosario" build, which is downloadable as a VPC. A new version is expected shortly, which would make sense since the most interesting conferences of all is about to kick-off in 4 weeks...

The Professional Developer Conference was last held in Los Angeles three years ago. Then Microsoft announced The LINQ Project, WinFX including workflow foundation and presentation foundation and the designer toolset we all know now as the Expression suite. This PDC is all about the cloud and Live, which sounds very promising.

Last saturday the Dutch code camp was organized by three user groups. There was a good crowd and especially the number of MVPs was impressive. My talk was on Modeling In VSTS Rosario. I demonstrated the publicly available Rosario CTP12 VPC in which you can see the new Architecture Explorer and UML diagrams. We had good discussions about why things are implemented in a certain way and good feedback that will go back to the VSTS product teams through our regular Rosario TAP calls.

I asked the organization for a code camp logo to show on blogs, etc. The below image is great, except that our code camp was in the MIC in Barneveld and luckily no real camping was involved...

Visual Studio Team System is Microsoft's solution for application lifecycle management. ALM helps software teams tremendously to ensure quality, predictability, etc. Microsoft released VSTS 2005 a few years ago and 2008 in November last year. Now development is underway for the next version of Visual Studio Team System codename "Rosario". You can find more information here http://msdn2.microsoft.com/en-us/vstudio/bb936702.aspx and you can even test-drive the latest bits http://blogs.msdn.com/jeffbe/archive/2008/04/11/april-rosario-ctp-now-available.aspx. If you do, please provide feedback through http://connect.microsoft.com/, which is one of the activities we do as part of the Rosario Technical Adoption Program. 

Last month has seen a lot of releases following the launch of Visual Studio 2008 and Team System http://blogs.msdn.com/somasegar/archive/2007/11/19/visual-studio-2008-and-net-framework-3-5-shipped.aspx , http://blogs.msdn.com/jeffbe/archive/2007/11/19/visual-studio-team-system-2008-ships.aspx

The story around VS SDK and Domain Specific Languages toolkit http://blogs.msdn.com/stuart_kent/archive/2007/11/22/what-s-new-for-dsl-tools-in-vs2008-vs2008-sdk.aspx

VSTS Web Access has made access to TFS so much easier for non-technicians http://blogs.msdn.com/bharry/archive/2007/11/30/vsts-web-access-power-tool-for-team-system-2008-released.aspx

The ASP.NET extensions provide a Model-View-Controller framework and VS2008 Silverlight support amongst others http://weblogs.asp.net/scottgu/archive/2007/12/09/asp-net-3-5-extensions-ctp-preview-released.aspx

And finally today the upgraded power tools for Team Foundation Server have been released http://blogs.msdn.com/bharry/archive/2007/12/21/december-07-release-of-the-tfs-power-tools-for-tfs-2008-are-available.aspx

If you are building .NET 2.0 applications, you really should take a look at all of the above.