Wednesday, May 20, 2009

Visual Studio 2010 Beta 1 - Test Drive

Finally we got VS 2010 Beta! I have just installed it and had a test drive of it. Look and feel is relay cool, seems more productive with lot of built-in functionality.

· Aims to become a tool for everyone involved in Application Lifecycle Management (ALM) – from architects to developers, from project managers to testers. Not just for developers.

· Unified Development and Database product editions.

Design & Architecture

· Architecture Explorer – to discover and identify existing code assets and architecture in number of ways including graphs, stacked diagrams and dependency matrices.

· Ability to create and share various types of diagrams like use case, activity and sequence diagrams.

· Modeling tools that are tightly integrated with code and thus helps in keeping model and code in sync.

· Architectural Validations - Ways to put constraints on code using models and doing validations at the time of check-ins and builds.

· Architecture Layer Diagram – One of the most useful and simple tool getting introduced. It allows representing your application architecture in form of layers and showing dependencies between them. It also allows to map physical components like classes, namespaces etc. to map to these layers. After all mappings you can validate whether the code meets the expected mappings and constraints.

· Microsoft joins OMG and UML gets introduced in Visual Studio 2010.

· Support for UML 2.1.1 – 5 out of 13 diagrams – use case, component, activity, class and sequence diagrams.

· Ability to keep all the UML diagrams in sync so that a change in one automatically reflects on others.

· UML design tool is developed using DSL toolkit.

· Will be interoperable with Visio 1.1 templates.

· Supports Top to bottom design approach.

· Supports Bottom to top design approach – reverse engineer. Filter based on namespaces, number of level deep.

· Model Explorer – Similar to Solution Explorer, this allows you to explore all the models you have created which includes objects created as part of various UML diagrams – logical view.

· Ability to create a Sequence Diagram from existing source, simply by right clicking in the VS code editor and selecting "Generate Sequence Diagram..."

· Parallel Programming: To better utilize power of multi-processor and multi-core machines, .NET 4.0 will add support for parallel programming using PLINQ, Task Parallel Library and Coordination Data Structures. The debugger has been enhanced to identify concurrency issues. Two new features added are MultiStack and a Task List views. Introduction of concurrency analysis report for performance analysis of applications.

Quality/ Testing

· Test Impact View - Identify and run only the tests impacted by a code.

· Eliminating ‘no-repro’ bug i.e. bugs that can’t be reproduced by providing tools for better collection of test data.

· The Microsoft Test Runner Tool – a standalone tool that a tester uses to guide them through a series of steps to complete a test case. During the test run, this tool can take snapshot of test environment, application screenshots and even capture full video for assisting in reproducing bugs.