Visual Studio 2005 Launch

07 December 2005   9:00 PM

Well, I've just spent today at the Edinburgh Corn Exchange for the launch of Microsoft's product line of Visual Studio 2005, SQL Server 2005 and BizTalk 2006, and I thought I might as well tell you about it.

Before I get into the meat of the topic, I'll just quickly comment on the venue and the menu. The venue is a nice building but having been to events in Edinburgh before I was expecting something more like one of the grand buildings just off Princes St. Don't get me wrong, it's a nice building, but it wasn't near to any part of Edinburgh I recognised and could have been AnyTown. You could obviously blame the fact I've never really been outside the tourists parts of Edinburgh for this, of course.

And credit to Microsoft for putting on such a spectacular lunch spread. There were all sorts of inventive dishes, including something which was like a vol-au-vent, but with Yorkshire Pudding instead of pastry. No, really. So I didn't know what anything was meant to be but it was all jolly nice which was the main thing.

There were a number of speakers, but unfortunately I didn't take note of their names, so I'll just have to give you my opinion on them. Fortunately, those nice Microsoft people have made available downloads from the conference so you don't just take my word for it. Please bear in mind I may have misheard or misunderstood, so don't just take my word for it - double check with Microsoft.

The capabilities of both SQL Server 2005 and BizTalk 2006 seemed impressive, but they didn't directly relate to me as much as did Visual Studio 2005 and so it was hard to remain focussed on these. This event, in common with other similar events, suffered slightly from the problem that it's difficult to remain concentrated on something that doesn't directly relate to yourself, when there's a guy talking at the other end of the hall, even if you can hear him clearly. I'm not suggesting there's a better way of doing it, because clearly the scale of the event would have prevented everyone from sitting together around a few PCs, I'm just saying that's the way it is with these things sometimes.

Visual Studio 2005

One of my main gripes with Visual Studio 2003 was its tendency at times to strip out closing / characters so <br /> would become <br>, and also the way it would capitalise some elements and restructure the HTML that you'd written. One of the reasons I was interested in VS 2005 was that I understood I wouldn't have these problems.

In fact, it's fair to say that there was a lot more to VS 2005 than just fixing these things. The Visual Studio 2005 'Team' option (the top end of the suite) has a lot of additional new features, most of which had me nodding my head and thinking "mmmm...nice." What was also particularly impressive was the fact that express (i.e. cut-down) editions of SQL Server and Visual Studio are available for nothing - at least for the next year. Visit Microsoft Express Editions Page.

There's the:

1. Team Foundation Source Control, which allows you to check work items in and out, but you can also set policies, so things can only be checked in if they satisfy certain criteria. Nice.
2. Shelving function which allows you to store a project as is (without checking it in) so that you can take a break from it temporarily and return to it later
3. A whole lot of architect tools which remind me in look of Visio but have been designed for specific purposes.
   1. Application designer
   2. System designer
   3. Logical datacenter designer
   4. Deployment designer
   5. And more are being developed by Microsoft and third parties, or you can build your own designers to suit.
4. Code Analysis features, which to be honest I didn't really follow but sounded interesting
5. Integrated Unit Testing which allows for data driven testing and demonstrates the parts of the code that have been covered by the testing
6. Integrated Debugging, allowing debugging on more securely tied-down environments
7. Code Profiling, which allows you to find out how long certain functions take to run etc

Please note however that there are different versions of Visual Studio Team edition, depending upon whether you're a 'solution architect', a 'software developer' or a 'software tester' etc and so all features may not be available in all versions

We were then given a demo of some of the testing features, including a scenario where one test is manually performed on a web page, recorded using a macro, then some of the parts of the macro (the input data) are replaced by information coming from a database, and then the whole bundle is run repeatedly at 30 times a second, simulating different users in terms of connection speeds and different browsers to perform load testing on the system. Now that's a handy thing to be able to do. Of course, I'm guessing this is only available in the 'software tester' version, but nonetheless it still looks good.

There have also been some enhancements to the .NET framework, with the launch of 2.0. While it seemed to run very slowly during the demo, I'll give them the benefit of the doubt (for now) and assume it was just "one of those things".

It now has a nice new feature for smart client applications (windows type software that can check for updates automatically on web servers), and you can test what applications will be like if they are running on environments with different security settings. Other added functions are that it incorporates site map functions, login controls, data controls and user profiles as new objects so you don't have to write these all from scratch if you want to use them. You can also use 'master pages' which I guess is a little like templates that update automatically - if you update the master page, all the sub pages based on that master page will show the latest version.

So what did I think overall?

Overall, I have to say I was genuinely impressed with the features on offer. Of course, there's still the possibility that I'll have problems coding XHTML with it, or some other similar issue, and obviously the launch event is only going to focus on the nice new shiny features and not try and pick fault with their own product. For that reason, I'll reserve judgement on how good the product is until I've had a look at it, but it's fair to say I'm impressed with the features I was shown.