Jason Zander's blog

Announcing the Release Candidate (RC) of Visual Studio 2012 and .NET Framework 4.5

Jason Zander — Thu, 31 May 2012 19:19:00 GMT

I’m happy to announce the Release Candidate of Visual Studio 2012, Team Foundation Server 2012, and .NET Framework 4.5. You can find these releases available for download on our Visual Studio product website.

In conjunction with today’s Visual Studio release, Windows has made available a Windows 8 Release Preview. Please visit the Building Windows 8 blog for the official announcement by Steven Sinofsky. You can download the Windows 8 Release Preview bits here.

The complete list of Visual Studio 2012 RC features is available on MSDN. In this post, I’ll summarize the updates we’ve made in Visual Studio 2012 RC, since the beta. Given where we are in the product cycle, these updates are primarily final touches on existing features, responses to beta customer feedback, and improvements to performance. I’ve recorded a video, so you can also see some of these updates in action.

What’s new in the RC since Beta

Logo & Branding

You’ll notice that we’ve updated our product branding from the “11” version number to the 2012 year. This means that the RTM version will release this calendar year!

You will also notice that we’ve updated our Visual Studio logo to the image below:

Setup

One of the first parts of the product you’ll experience is setup. We’ve enabled upgrade from beta to RC, so if you’re using the same product edition (e.g. Professional, Ultimate, etc.), you do not need to uninstall the beta first. Simply run the Visual Studio 2012 RC installer, which will uninstall the right Beta bits and lay down the RC bits, all at once. The only exception is if you’re running on Windows 8 – in that case, you need to first install the Windows 8 Release Preview and then install Visual Studio 2012 RC.

We’ve made some pretty significant investments in improving the setup experience in Visual Studio 2012 RC. Many of you have already seen the streamlined user interface in the beta. From beta to RC, we reduced the installation time by an additional 20%!

We also re-introduced customization into the product. We hope you’ll enjoy these improvements that should save you time and make it easier to get the right bits.

Visual Studio 2012 RC Setup customization UI

Performance

The performance work done between beta and RC was extensive and covers just about every aspect of the product. There were improvements in XAML (compiler, loading documents, and the design surface), debugging, editing large C++ files, Test Lab Management and the list goes on.

To give a few examples, we’ve put together some blog posts detailing the process in the team to identify, fix, and monitor these improvements. The first example we discussed was typing and editing responsiveness. I encourage you to read this post, where you can learn more about the internal performance tools, the product changes that were made, and the resulting impact on responsiveness. In the next post, we’ll cover performance improvements to the Toolbox.

User Interface

The RC includes a series of improvements to the overall UX, which were based on the beta user feedback. I encourage you to visit the Visual Studio team blog for a more comprehensive post with details on these changes.

Visual Studio 2012 RC light theme

After the Visual Studio team post on the above mentioned changes, we received requests for more information on the Visual Studio 2012 dark theme (a personal favorite). Earlier this week, we published a blog post with the roadmap for the dark theme, showing changes in the RC as well as others coming in RTM. I encourage you to take a look and see what’s in store ahead.

IDE

The IDE improvements in RC focus on responses to customer feedback, polishing features, and performance improvements.

We received feedback about the shared scope and options between Quick Find and Find-in-Files in the beta. Since then, we released an extension to help address this in the short term, and have now included that update in the RC release. With the RC, you can now perform a Quick Find without automatically changing the scope setting in Find-in-Files as well.

Solution Explorer is an example of an area where we made some tweaks to round out the experience and polish the feature in RC. We found that the Solution Explorer toolbar was overflowing, so we removed commands that already have other placements in the IDE (e.g. context menus, key bindings, menus) and don’t affect the solution view or project hierarchy.

For large solutions, it can be hard to find items in Solution Explorer. In the RC, we’ve introduced Solution Explorer filtering to help you scope to the relevant content and focus on whatever is important for your current task. This way, you can restrict Solution explorer to show just the files you're currently working with. The new filtering options include Pending Changes and Open Files, and can be found under the button shown below:

Finally, we improved the Quick Launch performance, so that search results are returned nearly instantaneously now.

Metro style apps

If you plan to build Metro style apps, make sure to install Visual Studio 2012 RC on a machine with the Windows 8 Release Preview. There are a number of enhancements for building Metro style apps in the RC release.

Metro style apps using XAML

First off, there are some new Metro style app templates, including a new Windows Runtime Component template for C# and VB developers, and a new DLL project template for C++ developers. There have also been improvements to the existing templates. For example, the templates now fully support keyboard and mouse navigation, in addition to touch. Furthermore, XAML support is now added to the Direct2D template. The XAML Blank App has also been simplified.

The Visual Studio XAML and Blend designers have been enhanced in the RC. You can now preview and edit the design of your Metro style app, for view states such as FullScreenLandscape, FullScreenPortrait, Filled, and Snapped. This is done through the Device panel, which automatically changes visual states when the View is changed. Below you can see an example of the Snapped visual state.

Selecting “Enable state recording” (above) will enable changes made on the Design Surface or Property Inspector to alter the currently selected visual state rather than always making changes to Base.

Adding theme animations from the Animation library in your app’s visual states, is now easy to do using Blend’s visual state design feature. The Animation library is a suite of Metro style animations that has been built specifically to take advantage of the platform’s animation capability. These animations are used throughout Windows UI and are also available for your Metro app. Select the desired state in the States pane, then the storyboard in the Objects & Timeline to see the state storyboard’s properties, including Theme Animations as shown in the screenshot below.

There have been a number of performance improvements for Metro style apps using XAML. Examples include better support for IRandomAccessStream from .NET, more aggressively reclaiming memory upon Metro app suspend, and the introduction of .NET performance testing in the Windows App Certification Kit. We also enabled Multi-Core JIT for Metro style apps and improved the algorithm by which Metro style apps are optimized for performance with NGEN.

Metro style apps using JavaScript

When it comes to editing Metro style Javascript applications, Blend has introduced a host of new features for the RC release. One of these features is a new way to organize Winning Rule in the styles pane, and is called “Arrange by: Source” mode. In this mode you can easily see where all of your element’s CSS properties come from.

We’ve also created editors for simplified editing of gradients and 2D transforms:

Finally, we put a lot of focus on productivity and refactoring gestures. This includes context menus to quickly and easily edit classnames and create CSS rules from an elements ID or classnames. It also includes the ability to cut, copy, paste and clear CSS properties in order to easily enable moving CSS properties in between CSS rules.

For more information on using the RC for Metro style app development, I recommend visiting the Windows 8 App developer blog for a summary of what’s new in the Windows 8 RP for developers, as well as BlendInsider for further details on Blend.

ASP.NET 4.5

ASP.NET Web Forms has been updated to fully support the new async “await” keyword. Page events and control events can now be marked as “async” and utilize the new async support added in .NET 4.5”.

MVC 4 projects now include Entity Framework 5 which has full support for “migrations” allowing developers to keep their code and databases in sync as changes are made.

Enabling Database Migrations in ASP.NET MVC 4 via NuGet Console

ASP.NET MVC now also renders HTML 5 by default so when displaying the Person model the following HTML will be emitted now: id="BirthDate" name="BirthDate" type="datetime" value="5/31/2012 12:00:00 AM"

Web tools

If you’re doing web development, you’ll notice a handful of updates in the RC. First off, we’ve updated some of the project templates. We made the MVC4 Empty template truly empty, and renamed the original empty template to now be called the “Basic” template. We also improved the performance of the New Project creation time.

You’ll also notice some IDE improvements. For example, we now support the ability to run an app from Visual Studio in multiple browsers, through a more discoverable UI.

There’s a host of additional web tooling improvements. For example, HTML and CSS editor enhancements, including updated HTML5 IntelliSense and SVG support. We also updated the publish UI to support incremental database schema preview. The Page Inspector experience has been improved, such that we no longer add web.config appSettings key VisualStudioDesignTime:Enabled, as page inspector will work with server side code as long as it’s in debug mode. For more information on these updates, as well as the complete list of web improvements in Visual Studio 2012 RC, please visit the Web Development Tools blog.

LightSwitch

For LightSwitch projects, there are several new features that we’ve lit up in RC. Last March, we published a preview of the LightSwitch Cosmopolitan Shell & Theme on the VS Gallery to give LightSwitch applications a more modern look-and-feel and corporate branding. Since then, we’ve fixed a significant number of community reported visual bugs and improving readability (such as adding data grid lines). Based on the positive feedback, we’ve now made the Cosmopolitan Shell & Theme the default UI for new projects (shown below).

Another change that we made based on customer feedback was to add the application logo to the login screen for applications using forms authentication. It will show up once you deploy the application. Furthermore, we have significantly improved the performance of core data operations, which in turn improves many application scenarios (querying, paging, loading data in a list/grid, etc.). You can find more information about LightSwitch updates in RC on the LightSwitch team blog and Developer Center.

Team Foundation Server

There were a few updates to TFS since the beta. The first is the ability to use SQL backups of existing Team Foundation Server instances to create (upgrade) a new Team Foundation instance during the initial setup. The second is the ability to automatically add new features to existing projects using older Team Project Templates when upgrading – this has been one of the most requested upgrade features for Team Foundation Server.

The Team Foundation Server team also improved the user interfaces with updates such as the ability to collapse/expand iterations in Team Web access and the addition of personal and favorite queries in pending changes – which makes it simple to drag and drop related work items to a pending checkin.

For more information on the TFS 2012 RC release, please visit Brian Harry’s blog.

Testing Tools

Most of the testing improvements in the RC focused around customer feedback on the beta, as well as a variety of performance and scalability improvements (for example, reducing the size of the output files from test runs and code coverage result).

Coded UI Features

Visual Studio 2012 RC includes a new feature for the analysis of Coded UI Test playback logs, which filters and logs important information for you in a more readable format. Using the actionable information in the Coded UI Test logs, you should able to debug issues more quickly. For example, here’s a picture of the new log, after running a Coded UI Test on a failure case:

Here, you can see a step by step view of all the actions and useful information that were captured by the new logger:

We’ve also made enhancements to the extensibility APIs for Coded UI, to better support integration of 3^rd party controls.

Microsoft Test Manager

To make it even easier to get up and running using Microsoft Test Manager, we’ve integrated a Media Foundation based Video Recorder so you no longer have to install the Expression Encoder to create video recordings of your test cases.

Architectural Tools

In RC the Architecture Tools include new facilities for understanding the structural relationships between elements of the code. You can now use contextual commands on selected code elements in a dependency graph to find, for example, all the types derived directly or indirectly from another type, or the methods that call a selected method:

You can also see what is causing a dependency link between higher level components (e.g. namespaces), by drilling into that link to see the contributing dependency links between subcomponents (e.g. types or methods):

On the UX side, it’s now possible to apply different layouts to the contents of individual group nodes, including a new “List View” compact layout:

“Go Live” License

As with the beta, Visual Studio 2012 RC ships with a “Go Live” license. This means that you can use the product to build apps that run in production. For more information on the “Go Live” terms and how to get support if you need it, please visit the Visual Studio 2012 RC website.

Related Resources

Here’s a list of related resources to help you get started with the RC:

Tell Us What You Think About the RC

As usual, we’re looking forward to hearing from you about your experience with the release. Please feel free to contact us through the following channels:

Ask a question on the Visual Studio or Windows forums
File a bug on the Visual Studio, LightSwitch, or Blend Connect sites (or with the Visual Studio Feedback Tool)
Submit a suggestion on UserVoice

Enjoy!

Follow me at twitter.com/jlzander.

Welcome to the new blog design

Jason Zander — Wed, 30 May 2012 21:30:00 GMT

Redesigning our blogs reminded me of painting the walls at home. It’s one of those things you never have the time to get around to, but are happy when you finally do!

(source)

Here’s a picture of my old blog theme, as a reminder:

We updated the design for a number of the developer tools blogs, and also created a network tying them together. (You can learn more about the new blog network on the Visual Studio team blog.) Beyond updating the style, there were a few things we wanted to do with the redesign. Of course we wanted to make it easy to read, comment on, and subscribe to posts. We also wanted to make it easy to share and discuss the posts with others, by adding social media buttons. Finally, we wanted to provide additional ways to connect with us, by including video and Twitter feeds.

I hope you enjoy this refresh, and the additional integration. I’m looking forward to continuing many more conversations here in the future.

Enjoy!

Follow me at twitter.com/jlzander.

My Favorite Features: Managing Projects with the Backlog, Sprint Planning and Taskboard Features in Team Foundation Server 11

Jason Zander — Tue, 29 May 2012 15:24:00 GMT

In my earlier post on Continuous Value Delivery, I talked about the role that features like the backlog, sprint planning, and taskboard play in tracking requirements and managing the development process. In this post, I’ll dive deeper into what this all looks like in action. I’ve been using these features in my personal coding projects against the new Team Foundation Service preview (http://www.tfspreview.com). However, they will ship as a part of Team Foundation Server 11 as well.

Backlog Management

Each one of my projects has a healthy list of items I need to work on. I use the Visual Studio 11 Scrum process template, so the work items in my list are called Product Backlog Items, or PBIs. If you’re using one of the other available templates, these work items would be known as User Stories, Requirements, or something different. Regardless of the name and definition of the work item, the Product Backlog features work exactly the same.

One of the first things you’ll notice is the new UI we’ve built in our Team Foundation Server web client. It’s designed to be very simple to use and optimized for common tasks like adding new PBIs, assigning PBIs to upcoming iterations, and even forecasting progress through the backlog.

Adding Work

Let’s start with adding and prioritizing work. First off, how do you add something new to the Product Backlog? At the top of the backlog is a small panel we call the “add panel”. You can turn this panel on or off using the view filters on the right side of the page.

Figure 1 – The Add Panel

When turned on, you simply select the work item type, enter a title, and click Add. The new work item is then added to your product backlog above the item you had selected.

Figure 2 - Adding a new PBI

The add panel has a set of defaults associated with it that automatically set work item field values for you. This is nice because it allows you to enter details in your work item forms that aren’t “in your face” each time you want to work with the backlog. (Please note, however, that we don’t allow work item customization on the Team Foundation Service Preview at this time.) Below is a screenshot after the PBI has been added.

Figure 3 - PBI Added

You can also open any work item quickly on the backlog to fill out additional details. In this case, let’s put an estimate on the new requirement we just added. As I’m sure many of you do, I’ve been using the Fibonacci sequence to do my estimating for items on my backlogs. In this case, we’ll add an estimate of three. You can also see in the form that I’m able to add a detailed description to the PBI as well as acceptance criteria that define when this PBI will be done.

Figure 4 - Adding an Effort Estimate

Prioritizing Work

Now that you’ve seen how easy it is to add new work, let’s talk about probably the most common use of the product backlog – prioritizing work. This is where things start to get really fun. Let’s now use our example above and move the new PBI we just added to the top of the backlog. To do this, we’ll just click and drag it up to the top (as pictured below). If we want to move it down, we do the same. It’s really simple.

Figure 5 - Reprioritizing the Backlog

We can also use these drag and drop features to assign work to an upcoming sprint. To place a PBI in an upcoming sprint we simply drag it over to the list of sprints on the left side of the screen, as shown below.

Figure 6 - Sprint Assignment

Once that’s done you’ll notice that the Iteration Path field is updated to reflect the sprint selected. Again, you can see how the UI has been designed to make common tasks like this simple.

Forecasting Progress

The final feature I want to highlight on the on Product Backlog is something called “forecast lines”. What are these forecast lines? Well, they’re simply a way to use your existing velocity (the amount of effort you’re able to complete in each sprint) and overlay that on top of your backlog. By doing this, you can start to forecast how the remaining backlog will lay out over future sprints. Let’s take a look.

I’m going to start by turning on the forecast lines by clicking the forecast toggle just above the backlog. You’ll then notice a set of horizontal lines drawn through your backlog at set intervals. In this example, my velocity is 15 units of effort.

Figure 7 - Forecast Lines

The forecast lines are showing me that based on a forecast of 15, I can complete the first four items on my backlog. The forecast is also telling me that item five on my backlog is too big for me to complete in the next sprint (sprint 5). If this is a problem, I can simply reprioritize by dragging and dropping. I can also change my estimated velocity, as shown below, to see how the forecast changes.

Figure 8 - Adjust Velocity Estimates

It’s important to note that forecast lines aren’t actually changing the plan. For example, you’ll see that the Iteration Path values remain unchanged when the forecast is turned on. Forecast lines are just another tool you can use to help you better understand the work your team is doing.

Planning and Running a Sprint

After your backlog is created and prioritized, the final step is to actually do some work! In our example we’ve already added a few items into Sprint 5. I’m going to now click on Sprint 5 to open the sprint planning view. Here, I can assign work to members of my team, load balance the work across the sprint, and break down each PBI into a set of actionable tasks. There are some options here to help you understand capacity per team member and capacity per activity. But I obviously don’t use those features much for my personal coding project, as I’m just a team of one. J That said, I’d encourage you to check them out as they are designed to help you make a strong commitment to your sprint.

Figure 9 - Planning a Sprint

After my plan is set, I use the taskboard to track progress on my work. The new taskboard is designed to make this really simple. You just drag and drop tasks from left to right as they move from “Not Started”, to “In Progress”, to “Done”. It’s easy to update hours on the board, and you can see your overall progress on the live burndown chart.

Figure 10 - Taskboard

We’re also using these tools ourselves, to develop the Visual Studio product. I’ve included a picture below of one of our own teams here in Redmond using the taskboard during a daily standup.

Figure 11 - Daily Standup

The icing on the cake is that all my tasks for the sprint show up directly in Visual Studio 11 in the My Work pane, as shown below. And when I check-in my changes, the tasks are automatically closed, and the hours zero’d out.

Figure 12 - My Work in Visual Studio 11

Conclusion

As you start using Team Foundation Server 11, I hope your teams find success managing your backlogs and executing sprints with these new features. To learn more, I recommend visiting MSDN. I’m looking forward to hearing your feedback and learning more about your experience with the new tools.

Enjoy!

Follow me at twitter.com/jlzander.

My Favorite Features: Creating Storyboards with PowerPoint

Jason Zander — Thu, 24 May 2012 17:51:00 GMT

In my last post on Continuous Value Delivery, I talked the importance of communication between the customer and the engineering team to arrive at a clear project definition. How many times have you built exactly what was asked for, but not what was wanted? Agile teams need the right communication tools to eliminate waste at this stage in the software lifecycle. In this post, I’d like to talk about PowerPoint Storyboarding, a new feature we built to help express and illustrate the intent of each item on the backlog. As the saying goes, “A picture is worth a thousand words”.

While working on my apps, I need a quick way to mockup UI and test different workflows before I start coding. I have PowerPoint on my machine, which I use all the time for presentations, so it’s quick and easy for me to mock things up there. In my case, these designs were primarily for my own review and brainstorming; however, this becomes even more valuable in a team environment where you can attach and link storyboards directly to items on the backlog.

Prerequisites

Here are the specific prerequisite versions that you’ll need to follow along with this post. [Added May 29, 2012]

To create and modify storyboards by using PowerPoint Storyboarding, you must have installed either Office PowerPoint 2007 or later, and one of the following versions: Microsoft Visual Studio 11 Test Professional Beta, Visual Studio 11 Premium Beta or Visual Studio 11 Ultimate Beta.
To view storyboards that were created using PowerPoint Storyboarding, you must have either Office PowerPoint 2007 or later installed.

Building the Storyboard

Once you have these components installed, just fire up PowerPoint and open up the Storyboarding tab. Click on the Storyboard Shapes button to open the new shapes toolbar (shown below). The shapes in the toolbar work just like traditional shapes in PowerPoint; however, we’ve added some magic to preserve aspect ratios and help make the process of building a Storyboard really easy.

Figure 1 - Storyboard Shapes

The first think you’ll often want to do is add a background. I’ll do this by double-clicking one of the backgrounds from the toolbar. In this case, we’re going to grab the Tablet (landscape) background. If you’re a more advanced PowerPoint user you can place the background on a Layout slide. Next I’ll add a few additional shapes from the toolbar to create the look and feel we’re after.

Figure 2 - Adding a Background

I’m not too concerned about the details on this first slide as I just want to convey intent (in fact we don’t want to make things look too perfect, or the customer might think it’s done ;). Next, I’ll add a slide that speaks more to the feature I’m designing. In this case, I’m building a feature for my app that allows the user to select from a list of options. First, I’ll add a charm bar to the page that I’ll use to access the options.

Figure 3 – Building the Flow

Next, I’ll build out the options page by grabbing a list object, resizing it to fit the screen, and then adding a few on/off toggle buttons, which you might recognize from tablet and phone applications.

Figure 4 – Designing the Options page

As you can see, in just a few slides, the storyboard is beginning to show my plan for the application.

Custom Shapes

I often find that I’m re-using the same group of shapes. I’ve found the “Add to My Shapes” feature very convenient for this. I can highlight all the shapes I added to my options slide and select “Add to My Shapes” from the ribbon (as shown below). This places this new shape into my shapes toolbar so I can re-use it on additional slides. You can even export the shapes to share with other members of your team.

Figure 4 - Custom Shapes

Gathering Feedback

Before you know it, as I continue adding more slides and inserting more shapes, I end up with a PowerPoint presentation that communicates what I’m planning to build. The real beauty here is that I can get things “right” before I invest too much time coding. A storyboard like this can be used to solicit feedback from stakeholders and can even be linked or attached directly to a backlog item. Your customers all have PowerPoint, so it’s a familiar tool that they can easily pick up and use.

One of the most powerful aspects of Storyboarding is that you can convey the flow of the app you’re building interactively, not just with a set of pictures. Because PowerPoint has built in presentation features like slide transitions, you can create a click-through storyboard, which allows customers to navigate between screens and even simulate the application gestures. Add a new slide for each screen, include a bit of animation, and you’ve got something that looks and feels like the real thing.

In fact, a good portion of Visual Studio 11 and Team Foundation Server 11 was spec’d using this tool. I’ve gotten really used to communicating my ideas in this way, and am using this feature all the time now.

Conclusion

I hope you have an opportunity to give PowerPoint Storyboarding a try, and save some time by communicating with these designs in your team. For more information, please read about Storyboarding on MSDN.

Enjoy!

Follow me at twitter.com/jlzander.

Continuous Value Delivery with Visual Studio 11 ALM

Jason Zander — Wed, 23 May 2012 22:30:00 GMT

In the next couple of posts, I’m going to dive into some of my favorite ALM features coming in Visual Studio 11. In this post, I’d like to first provide some framing on the larger context for the release, so you can see how these features fit in.

At each stage of the application lifecycle, it’s important to ensure that you’re accruing value to the customer. Any overhead or waste in the system detracts from this goal. By using the right development tools, you can create transparency between team members, reduce delivery cycle times, and accelerate the flow. With Visual Studio 11, we’re taking our Application Lifecycle Management solution to the next level by enabling stronger collaboration between functional teams and helping reduce waste at each stage of the product delivery. Let’s see what this means for each of the three stages below.

Define

The project starts with defining the requirements. But communicating requirements from the customer to the engineering team is not always easy. How many times have you built exactly what was asked for, but not what was wanted? Your software has to connect all members of the project, using tools that they’re comfortable with. PowerPoint storyboarding is a natural solution for this. (More details coming in the next post.)

Setting out to start the project, there’s a lot of planning required and decisions to make. You need to decide what core customer problems you want to solve and in what priority (product backlog). You also need to check how this fits with your resources (capacity planning) and schedule the work (sprint planning). Finally you need to track progress against the plan and make adjustments as you go (managing tasks). Team Foundation Server 11 provides tools to help with all of these activities, and keep the project on track. I’ll show how this all works in an upcoming post.

Develop

The next phase of the cycle is building the software. During development, we want to make sure we eliminate drift and make the cycle faster. The longer the time between a feature request and the team delivering, the more likely disconnects become. Rather than wait a long time, when it becomes expensive to fix, we want to get feedback early and often. To help with this, Visual Studio 11 introduces a new feedback tool which allows the customer to collect video and audio of the feedback session as well as the action logs. This kind of rich feedback done in a timely way keeps everyone in sync.

In order to deliver high quality products, we need to assess and monitor along the way. Unit testing is a great way to ensure quality in the final product. (You can see my previous post on enhancements to unit testing in the Visual Studio 11 release.) Once the software has been finished by the development team, you need to do your quality assurance passes. For this, you can use the manual and coded testing features from VS 2010, as well as the new Exploratory Testing tools in Visual Studio 11 to help look for additional issues.

Operate

Now we get to the final stage of operating software and delivering its business value. This is where the relationship between the application development and the IT operations teams becomes critical. You need to be able to diagnose issues as they occur in production, and deploy new builds quickly to respond to customer needs. And again, each team needs to be able to work with tools they’re familiar and comfortable with.

In Visual Studio 11, we’ve taken a first step towards adding tools to operate software better. We’ve integrated Preemptive Analytics into the product, which provides production telemetry such as your top crash reports. We’ve also introduced the new management pack, which allows critical production issues detected by System Center to be immediately assigned to the development team with high quality diagnostic information via TFS and Visual Studio. This allows developers and operators to use familiar purpose built tools that still manage to talk to each other seamlessly.

Video

I’ve included a video presentation below, where I talk about these concepts further. I recommend viewing to gain a deeper understanding of the themes discussed in this post, and our Microsoft vision for ALM.

Conclusion

The Visual Studio 11 ALM feature set marks an important step forward in enabling teams to work together more swiftly. However, we also know we’re on a journey. Continuous value delivery means the development cycle doesn’t end for us either. We’re going to be thinking of new features every day, shipping Ultimate Feature Packs, and delivering the same value to you that you deliver to your customers.

My Favorite Features: Unit Testing Enhancements in Visual Studio 11

Jason Zander — Tue, 22 May 2012 19:40:00 GMT

I’ve been writing a set of posts on some of my favorite Visual Studio 11 features that I’m using in my personal development. In my last post, I talked about JavaScript tooling enhancements. In this post, I’d like to talk about the new unit testing features. Unit testing is an important step in the development process, and is something we are doing throughout the team in Visual Studio. I’ve also been writing unit tests while working on my personal coding projects.

Third-Party Test Frameworks

Developers who are passionate about unit testing will often tell you why their favorite framework is the best. With Visual Studio 11, we wanted to give people a top-notch, developer-focused experience that let them use whatever framework they wanted. To add a unit testing framework to your development environment, just install the plugin from the Visual Studio Extension Manager (pictured below) or the Visual Studio Gallery online.

There are many test framework plugins available at this point, including:

NUnit
xUnit.net
MbUnit
QUnit
Jasmine

And of course we still have the built-in test “MS-Test” framework for .NET code, as well as a new framework for C++ code.

Writing Tests with NUnit

Let’s take a look at the example of NUnit. The NUnit team shipped an adapter for Visual Studio 11 Beta on the same day the beta was released and just recently released an update with some important bug fixes. Getting started is as easy as installing the NUnit Test Adapter for Visual Studio 11 Beta here.

In this example, I’m using a test project, which is a .NET Class Library with a reference to NUnit.Framework.dll. Here’s a quick NUnit test to show how this works.

Then click “Run All” in the Unit Test Explorer window and see the results.

This ability to use different third party unit testing frameworks, and even to mix them within a single solution, was a major ask from our customers over the years. Now you can easily extend your experience to let your team use the unit testing engine they prefer.

Running Tests Continuously

As you’re writing tests and code, and running the tests in-between each step, you may find it gets a bit tedious to constantly switch back and forth. In Visual Studio 11, you can now configure the Test Explorer to automatically run unit tests after each successful build. This is a real time-saver because it makes the test run feel like it’s part of the build.

Thinking about your unit tests as part of the build is a natural thing. For a long time, teams have used continuous integration servers to build and run tests for every check-in. Now you can get that same outcome on your local machine.

To turn it on, just toggle the “Run Tests After Build” option in the Test Explorer toolbar.

The nice thing about this feature is that it lets you focus on the code and not on the other tool windows in Visual Studio. Only when things fail do you stop to look around and see what happened.

Debugging a Test When Something Goes Wrong

When a test fails, there are a few ways to figure out what went wrong. First, you can check the test runner, which provides rich exception information. In cases when that’s not enough, it can be useful to view the test with the debugger. With Visual Studio 11, you can debug NUnit tests the same way you debug other managed tests. To do this, simply right click on the test in the Test Explorer and choose “Debug Selected Tests”.

Analyzing My Test Results

There are a number of analytics you may want to perform on your unit tests, and the most common one people use is code coverage. We significantly simplified the experience around collecting code coverage information for your unit tests, and enabled it to work with your 3^rd party unit test projects. As pictured below, let’s select “Analyze Code Coverage” in the Test Explorer.

Now when the run completes, it will open the Visual Studio Code Coverage Results window, and display editor highlighting so I can easily determine where more test coverage may be required.

You can also easily check the coverage for a test (or a set of tests) by right clicking on what you want to analyze and selecting “Analyze Code Coverage”. This can be very handy when adding tests to existing code. The in-editor coverage coloring let you see exactly what parts of your code were run by the tests you selected.

Unit Testing Browser-based Javascript

Part of my recent application was browser based, and used a lot of the new stuff shipping with ASP.NET MVC in Visual Studio 11. If you want to unit test Javascript, you can use QUnit (the unit testing framework used by JQuery) with the Chutzpah adapter available on the Visual Studio Gallery.

As you can see, the QUnit tests are discovered and executed in the same experience as other unit tests. The extensibility of VS 11 unit testing makes supporting additional unit test framework like QUnit as simple as getting (or writing) an appropriate plugin that supports that system.

Unit Testing Native C++ Applications

As mentioned earlier, we also have the ability in Visual Studio 11 to do native unit testing, with a new C++ unit testing framework shipping in the box. We’re really happy to enable this support for our C++ developers, so you no longer need to use the “/clr” flag or fall back to 3rd party frameworks.

Here’s a quick example:

For a full-fledged sample application, I recommend checking out the Hilo project, by the Patterns & Practices team, which now includes native C++ unit tests.

To learn more about native unit testing in Visual Studio 11, please visit MSDN.

Conclusion

In this post, we reviewed a range of new improvements for unit testing. These came about by the team focusing on a couple of key customer goals:

1. Flexibility – Use whatever test framework your team prefers

2. Simplicity & Consistency – Get a simple, consistent experience that lets developers focus on their work

I hope you will have an opportunity to try out the new Visual Studio 11 unit testing features. For more information, please visit MSDN.

Enjoy!

Follow me at twitter.com/jlzander.

My Favorite Features: Improved Tooling in Visual Studio 11 for JavaScript Developers

Jason Zander — Thu, 10 May 2012 19:02:00 GMT

I’ve been working on some coding projects lately, and spending a lot of time in Visual Studio 11. I wanted to start a series to share some of my favorite features that I’ve enjoyed using in the product. One feature that I ended up using a lot, while working with jquery and jquerymobile, is the new JavaScript tooling support.

IntelliSense

The first thing you’ll notice when doing JavaScript development in Visual Studio 11 is IntelliSense. After using it, you might forget that you’re working in a dynamic language! The JavaScript editor has been completely rewritten on top of the same Chakra runtime that ships in IE10, which means that IntelliSense is more responsive, accurate and scalable than ever before.

The engine was designed to accommodate the development of both web and Metro style apps, so that regardless which platform you’re targeting, you’ll get the same rich IntelliSense experience. You can see examples of this in the table below.

Host API	Sample Screenshot
WinRT
WinJS
JavaScript (ES5)
DOM
HTML5

Examples of using IntelliSense against various host-provided APIs

Third-Party Libraries

The JavaScript community is extremely active, and as a result, produces an almost constant flow of reusable components and libraries. This strong ecosystem makes it great to be a JavaScript developer, and we appreciate that everyone has their own favorite libraries. To ensure that a developer’s preferences don’t inhibit their IntelliSense experience, the JavaScript editor has been designed to recognize and support modern third-party libraries so that you get a “native”-like experience when consuming their APIs. You can see examples of this below.

Library

Sample Screenshot

jQuery

RequireJS

+ jQuery

Using the
RequireJS
extension

Examples of using IntelliSense against 3^rd party libraries

These examples highlight a couple of interesting new features that make the IntelliSense support so compelling in VS11:

1) IntelliSense is available for parameters within DOM event handlers

2) Any child scripts that a library requests will be automatically downloaded and made available for IntelliSense

In addition, library authors have the ability to augment the IntelliSense experience (as RequireJS has done in the example above). This way, when a library makes use of a pattern that the IntelliSense engine doesn’t understand the semantics about, the library can provide this information. This ensures that developers continue to get an amazing editing experience while library authors can be as expressive as they want when designing their API.

Enhancing IntelliSense with XML Doc Comments

Despite how accurate IntelliSense is, JavaScript is ultimately a dynamic language. Therefore, there are still times when the value of an object is too ambiguous for the editor to know what you expect to see when accessing it. For those instances, you can provide “hints”, in the form of XML doc comments, which explicitly declare your completion list expectations. This feature has been in Visual Studio for a few releases, and has been enhanced in Visual Studio 11 to make it easier to use.

One neat enhancement is the ability to annotate the value of an object, as opposed to its type (constructor function). Simply provide an example of what the object’s value could be and IntelliSense will take care of the rest. This allows you to define an IntelliSense-only “type” without having to modify your existing API.

options.settingOne being recognized as a Number because of the value annotation

The value attribute can be set to any JavaScript expression which allows you to get as creative as you want in order to ensure you get exactly the IntelliSense you’re looking for.

options.gameCanvas being set to an <canvas> due to the execution of a jQuery selector

Once you get the hang of using doc comments, they can help speed up your development. For more details about how to use them, make sure to read the documentation.

Debugging

Another place where I really felt the difference in Visual Studio 11 was with the JavaScript debugging. It saved me a couple of times!

When you begin debugging your app, you’ll immediately notice a couple of new tool windows: DOM Explorer and JavaScript Console. Both of these windows help you understand the browser’s interpretation of your app and perform quick and iterative updates without having to interrupt your debugging session.

DOM Explorer

Regardless whether you’re developing a web app or a Metro style app, you’re writing your UI in HTML and CSS. Trying to visualize a given page’s DOM, as well as the exact CSS properties needed to style it in the way you want, can become a daunting task for any non-trivial application. With the DOM Explorer, you can easily find an element in the DOM tree (by clicking the Select Element button), view the CSS properties that are applied to it, and tweak them on the fly. I’ve found this makes it a lot easier to perform “guess-and-check” operations on my HTML and CSS that would otherwise have taken a lot of time if I had to keep modifying my code and restarting the debugger.

Viewing a <p> element in the DOM along with the CSS styles that are applied to it

Any change you make will be immediately reflected in your running application. For example, if I change the color property (shown in the Trace Styles tab) of the currently selected <p> tag to “red” and then switch back to my Metro style app, all of the headers will be red.

I can continue to try different colors, experiment with various fonts, or make any other change to my app and get immediate visual feedback on how it would look. Pretty easy!

You can find more information on the DOM Explorer on MSDN.

JavaScript Console

While the DOM Explorer allows visual interaction with your app, the JavaScript Console allows you programmatic access. You can use it to execute any JavaScript expression, which provides a REPL for testing out arbitrary code.

I commonly find myself using the console to test code before adding it to my source. This iterative approach allows me to quickly validate some logic without having to worry about restarting the debugger in between revisions. Like the DOM Explorer, the console’s effects are reflected immediately, so you can view your changes in the running app as you make them.

For more information on the JavaScript Console, including custom console commands, please visit MSDN.

I also recommend visiting the Visual Studio blog for a great post on additional JavaScript debugging enhancements.

Conclusion

Whether you’re a seasoned JavaScript expert, or newly interested in the language, I hope you’ll have an opportunity to try out the new JavaScript tools in Visual Studio 11. Between the rich IntelliSense and the debugging capabilities of the DOM Explorer and the JavaScript Console, there are a lot of new features to explore.

Enjoy!

Follow me at twitter.com/jlzander.

Find out what’s in store for the Visual Studio 11 UI in the RC release

Jason Zander — Tue, 08 May 2012 17:02:00 GMT

After announcing the Visual Studio 11 Beta developer experience, we received considerable feedback on the UI. I want to thank you for all the comments you provided on this topic, and for taking the time to evaluate the beta release. At this point in the product cycle, we’ve been reviewing all of the beta feedback, and working on product updates for RC. Today we’re excited to share what these updates will look like for the UI. I encourage you to read more on the Visual Studio blog, where we’ve summarized the feedback we received on the beta, and showed the UI changes we have in store for RC.

April 27th What’s Happening Around Visual Studio

Jason Zander — Fri, 27 Apr 2012 22:33:00 GMT

Here’s a quick recap of what’s happening around the team.

The “Await” is Over: Async Targeting Pack for Visual Studio 11 now available with .NET Framework 4.0 and Silverlight 5 support

One of the requests we received after shipping Visual Studio 11 Beta (which I discussed in my Frequently Asked Questions post) was async support for projects targeting .NET Framework 4.0 or Silverlight 5. Unfortunately there was a breaking change that caused this to stop working in the Visual Studio 11 Beta. However, yesterday we released an Async Targeting Pack for Visual Studio 11 which fixes this issue. If you’re using Visual Studio 11 Beta and developing a project which targets .NET Framework 4.0 or Silverlight 5, I recommend installing the targeting pack. You can also view the release notes here. Please note that this targeting pack is not required for projects targeting .NET Framework 4.5 or .NET for Metro style apps (just .NET Framework 4.0 or Silverlight 5).

Spring Reading List: March & April Blog Roll

I’ve put together a rollup with some of the top blogs around the team from the past month or two. I hope you’ll find a few that interest you and dive in! Here’s a list of posts on Visual Studio 11:

- Async in .NET 4.5

- .NET Versioning and Multi-Targeting - .NET 4.5 is an in-place upgrade to .NET 4.0

- F# IntelliSense Improvements in Visual Studio 11 Beta

- Round-tripping with Visual Studio 11

- XAML authoring in Blend and VS: Workflow, Tools, and Tasks

- LightSwitch Architecture: OData

- Tips on Upgrading Your LightSwitch Applications to Visual Studio 11 Beta

- SharePoint Developer Tools in Visual Studio 11 Beta – Part III: Tips and Tricks in SharePoint List Designer

- Automatic requirement traceability with Exploratory Testing

- Branching Guide BETA release

We also published quite a few posts on Metro style app development. If you’re developing a Metro style app for Windows 8, these are for you!

- .NET for Metro style apps

- Keeping apps fast and fluid with asynchrony in the Windows Runtime

- Diving deep with WinRT and await

- How to improve performance in your Metro style app

- Tackling performance killers: Common performance problems with Metro style apps

- Managing app lifecycle so your apps feel "always alive"

- Creating a great tile experience (part 1)

- Deploying Metro style apps to businesses

- Build apps with the experts at Windows 8 Dev Camps

Channel9 videos are another good resource to check out, especially the Visual Studio Toolbox series.

Calling all Testers: STAREAST Videos Online

Last week, we participated in a conference for testers called STAREAST. Nearly 1,000 testers from around the world came to learn about the latest testing tools, technologies, and solutions. We delivered two sessions, which are available on-demand on the conference website until July 19, 2012. You can access them for free by registering here. Here are the sessions:

- “Continuous Quality Enablement with Microsoft Visual Studio”, by Matt Nunn (Microsoft)

- “7 Things You Don't Know About Visual Studio for Testers”, by Charles Sterling (Microsoft) & Theresa Lanowitz (voke, inc.)

Testers are an important part of our engineering teams here at Microsoft, and a key audience for our software tools. In each Visual Studio release we’ve added tooling for more roles in the engineering team, helping everyone work together better. For testers using Visual Studio 2010, we added Microsoft Test Manager, coded UI tests, and manual test recording. In Visual Studio 11, we further expanded our support for testers with exploratory testing, and enhancements to Microsoft Test Manager and Lab Management such as support for Metro style applications. Together, these features enable the team to better ensure quality throughout the software lifecycle.

I encourage you to check out the sessions to learn more and see these features in action.

Enjoy!

Follow me at twitter.com/jlzander.

Better Together: TFS 2010 and System Center 2012

Jason Zander — Tue, 17 Apr 2012 16:50:00 GMT

This week, we’re celebrating the launch of System Center 2012 at the Microsoft Management Summit (MMS) in Las Vegas. As part of the launch wave, we released a final version of the System Center Management Pack for TFS Work Item Synchronization, which is available for download here. This version of the management pack works with the current RTM versions of both products: TFS 2010 and the Operations Manager component of System Center 2012. (TFS 11 support will be coming in the future.)

Last year at the TechEd North America keynote I announced the first management pack CTP, and also talked about it in this interview on DotNetRocks. The management pack is designed for enterprises who want tighter collaboration between their development and operations teams. It takes alerts raised by the Application Performance Monitoring (APM) capability within the Operations Manager component of System Center 2012, and synchronizes them with TFS work items. Using the management pack, operations teams can easily forward the APM information directly into TFS as operational work items, and enable engineering teams to more quickly identify the root cause and develop a fix. This dramatically reduces the mean time to repair (MTTR) and helps the DevOps cycle.

Here are a few screenshots, so you can see how this all works. First, the operations staff sees an APM alert from a running application and sends it as a bug directly to the development team:

The fact that the issue goes directly into TFS (and not into email, for example) means that it will be going through the same process as the other bugs that the development team is already tracking and prioritizing. Next, after fixing the bug, the developers can quickly queue up a build for the operations team to deploy to production.

One of the great things about this solution is that the software automatically captures the relevant details that the developer needs to debug the issue. The support engineer doesn’t need to think about what information to collect, or even know what a callstack is. By capturing all this actionable data for the developer, the management pack bridges the worlds of operations and development, makes communication more simple and effective, and reduces friction between the two teams.

The management pack also includes two-way sync between TFS and Operations Manager. This enables visibility into the status of a work item from either product, and allows the operations team to keep track of when a fix might be available.

I’m really happy about our partnership with System Center and the value we’ve created across the two products. The combined strengths of the Visual Studio team in development and the System Center team in operations gives us the assets we need to provide great support for DevOps scenarios. Stay tuned for more news in the future.

If you missed the MMS keynote today, you can watch it on demand here. And don’t forget to download the System Center Management Pack for TFS!

Enjoy!

Follow me at twitter.com/jlzander.

April 12th What’s Happening Around Visual Studio

Jason Zander — Thu, 12 Apr 2012 18:55:00 GMT

Here’s a quick recap of what’s happening around the team.

Releases:

We’ve released some updates for the Visual Studio 11 and TFS 11 betas:

- Visual Studio 11 Beta: VS Update Service

- Team Foundation Server 11 Beta Power Tools (TFS 2010 users might also want to visit Brian’s blog for the latest list of TFS 2010 updates)

If you haven’t downloaded the betas yet, here are a couple of good resources that make it easy to get started:

- Visual Studio 11 Beta ALM Virtual Machine and Hands-on-Labs / Demo Scripts / DemoMates

- Visual Studio 11 Beta Readiness Materials by the ALM Rangers

We’ve had quite a bit of news lately around the work we’re doing to support open source communities. We announced new Git support on CodePlex (in addition to the current TFS and Mercurial support):

- Brian Harry: The Future of CodePlex is Bright

- CodePlex Blog: git commit –m “CodePlex now supports Git!”

We also shared news at DevConnections about open sourcing ASP.NET MVC 4, ASP.NET Web API, and ASP.NET Web Pages (Razor):

- Scott Guthrie: ASP.NET MVC, Web API, Razor and Open Source

- Scott Hanselman: ASP.NET MVC 4, ASP.NET Web API and ASP.NET Web Pages v2 (Razor) now all open source with contributions

For those doing mobile development, an additional release to note is the Windows Phone SDK 7.1.1 Update. This update provides support to use the SDK on Windows 8 Consumer Preview machines, and to develop apps for the new Windows Phone 7.5 256 MB devices:

- Windows Phone Developer Blog: Windows Phone SDK 7.1.1 Update Now Available

Events:

I recently blogged about my keynote at DevConnections, and also about Lang.NEXT which took place on Microsoft campus last week.

This summer, I will be keynoting TechEd North America (June 11-14) and TechEd Europe (June 26-29). We have an extensive content lineup in store, as well as lots of opportunities for networking and product team interaction. I’ve spoken at many TechEd conferences around the world, and I always enjoy connecting with customers and partners at these events. I hope you can join us.

Another event I’m currently involved in is ImagineCup, Microsoft’s student technology competition. ImagineCup is a great opportunity for students to practice their programming skills, and work together in a team to implement new ideas. This year’s ImagineCup competition includes a new Windows Metro Style App challenge, which I will help judge. I look forward to seeing what the students create!

Follow me at twitter.com/jlzander.

Tune in to Lang.NEXT Videos Online

Jason Zander — Fri, 06 Apr 2012 20:30:00 GMT

Language innovation is an important aspect of building developer tools. As technology evolves, so do the needs of developers, and programming languages must advance in order to continue providing a great experience for the tasks at hand. This means pushing the state of the art with our own languages—such as the upcoming async support in C# and VB and type providers in F#. It also means engaging very actively in standards work, as we do with C++ and ECMAScript (the JavaScript standard). We also strive to interact with the larger community of language innovators, and promote the exchange of ideas across the industry and academia as a whole. This is where Lang.NEXT comes in.

Lang.NEXT is a cross-industry conference on programming language design and implementation, which was hosted by Microsoft this past week. It’s a perfect setting to “geek out”, engage in deep technical discussions, and hear the latest thinking by top language designers from around the world. An impressive array of speakers from both industry and academia showed the work they’re doing in a wide spectrum of programming languages such as C#, C++, Java, JavaScript, F#, Scala, Haskell, Dart, Go, D, as well as new paradigms like the “disorderly programming” of Bloom and the “probabilistic programming” with Infer.NET. From the academic world we saw fresh ideas, in the languages Grace and Julia. We also dove into some implementation and infrastructure topics such as Roslyn, IKVM.NET (Java on .NET) and the Windows Runtime.

All of the sessions are recorded and being posted on Channel 9. Some are available now, and the rest will be uploaded in the next week at the following location: http://channel9.msdn.com/Events/Lang-NEXT/Lang-NEXT-2012

I encourage you to have some fun diving into these talks, and get a glimpse into the future of programming languages.

Enjoy!

Follow me at twitter.com/jlzander.

Visual Studio Ultimate Roadmap

Jason Zander — Tue, 27 Mar 2012 15:45:00 GMT

Today at DevConnections I shared some insight into the roadmap ahead for our Visual Studio Ultimate product. Visual Studio Ultimate is our complete, state-of-the art toolset. It provides tools for all members of the team, from product owners to testers, and is ideal for the development of mission critical enterprise applications. It contains unique features like architecture modeling, code discovery, Quality of Service testing, and advanced cross-environment diagnostic tools, which help save the team time throughout the software development lifecycle. Beyond the product features, Visual Studio Ultimate subscribers also enjoy additional MSDN subscriber benefits year-round, including feature packs.

As developers, we want to provide solutions to customer problems and we’d like to deliver those improvements faster than before while ensuring high quality. In my past few blog posts, I’ve talked about new features in Visual Studio 11 which help you optimize for that faster development cycle including support for DevOps. We want to deliver that same level of continuous improvement for Visual Studio user’s as well. Today I shared news that after the Visual Studio 11 release, we will ship Visual Studio 11 Ultimate Feature Packs as an ongoing benefit. The goal of these feature packs is to further build on the value and scenarios that we’re delivering in Visual Studio 11. The main themes for the first feature pack will be SharePoint Quality of Service Testing scenarios, and the ability to debug code anywhere its run using our IntelliTrace technology. These are two challenges we see at the interface between development and operations teams, which we can help address with the right tools.

In Visual Studio 11, we’re removing friction between the development teams building software and the operations groups managing software in production. Enhanced IntelliTrace capabilities and features like TFS connector for System Center Operations Manager allow teams to monitor and debug their apps anywhere: in environments spanning development, test and even in production. In the first Ultimate Feature Pack after Visual Studio 11, we’ll continue building upon the IntelliTrace enhancements in Visual Studio 11. We’ll add new capabilities for customizing collection of trace data, including the ability to refine the scope of an IntelliTrace collection to a specific class, a specific ASP.NET page, or a specific function. This fine grained control will enable more targeted investigations and allow you to debug issues more quickly, saving hours of effort. We’ll also invest in results filtering making it faster to find the data you need as well as improved summary pages for quickly identifying core issues.

In Visual Studio 11 we are expanding our support for teams working with SharePoint with features like performance profiling, unit testing, and IntelliTrace support. In the first Ultimate Feature Pack after Visual Studio 11 we’ll make it easy to test your site for high volume by introducing SharePoint load testing. We will also make it easier to do SharePoint unit testing by providing Behaviors support for SharePoint API’s. This is a great win for teams developing SharePoint solutions.

I’m happy to share this future roadmap with you today, and excited about the benefits we’ll be offering to our Ultimate subscribers in this first feature pack and beyond. These announcements are a sneak peek at the road ahead, and we will keep you updated as these plans materialize in the future.

Also make sure to visit Brian Harry’s blog to learn more about another announcement we made today, regarding build in the cloud for the Team Foundation Service Preview.

Enjoy!

Follow me at twitter.com/jlzander.

March 21st What’s Happening Around Visual Studio

Jason Zander — Wed, 21 Mar 2012 16:55:00 GMT

It’s been a busy month since releasing the beta of Visual Studio 11 and .NET Framework 4.5! I’ve included a roll-up here, so that you can check out the Microsoft blogs with deep dives into different parts of the beta product:

Application Lifecycle Management:

Visual Studio 11 Application Lifecycle Management Virtual Machine and Hands-on-Labs / Demo Scripts

Welcome to Visual Studio 11 ALM Rangers Readiness Beta “Wave”

Update Your Agile Team Project to Support Additional Functionality After You Upgrade from TFS 2010 to TFS11 Beta

Running IntelliTrace on Applications in Production

Testing:

What's new for Microsoft Test Manager in Visual Studio 11 Beta

Getting Started with Exploratory Testing

Visual Studio 11 Beta - What is new in Coded UI Tests?

What's New in Visual Studio 11 Beta Unit Testing

What’s new for MSTest unit tests in Visual Studio 11 Beta

Visual Studio 11 Beta: Manual Testing of Windows Metro Style Apps

Performance:

Visual Studio 11 Beta Performance Part #1: Overview & Virtual Memory Usage

Visual Studio 11 Beta Performance Part #2: Solution Load Time

Visual Studio 11 Beta Performance Part #3: Debugging

Improving Launch Performance for Your Desktop Applications

Setup & Install:

Announcing Visual Studio 11 Beta

Why Visual Studio 11 Requires Space on the System Drive

IDE:

Introducing the New Developer Experience

Introducing the New Developer Experience, Part #2

What’s New in Code Analysis for Visual Studio 11

What's new in Visual Studio 11 Dependency Graphs

.NET:

Introducing .NET Framework 4.5 Beta

What’s New for Parallelism in .NET 4.5 Beta

Introducing MEF Lightweight Composition and an Updated Composition Provider for ASP.NET MVC

MSDN: What's New in WPF Version 4.5 Beta

Optimizing the .NET Framework Deployment Experience for Users and Developers

C#/VB:

C#: Visual Studio 11 Beta Is Here!

Visual Basic 11 Beta Available for Download!

C++:

What's New in Visual Studio 11 Beta for C++ Developers

What’s up with MFC in Visual Studio 2011 Beta

MSDN Magazine: New Standard Concurrency Features in Visual C++ 11

F#:

Introducing Visual F# 3.0 Beta!

C9 Lectures: Donna Malayeri - F# 3.0 - Information Rich Programming

LightSwitch:

Announcing LightSwitch in Visual Studio 11 Beta!

Enhance Your LightSwitch Applications with OData

Creating and Consuming LightSwitch OData Services

MSDN Magazine: Consume a LightSwitch OData Service from a Windows Phone application

Using LightSwitch OData Services in a Windows 8 Metro Style Application

LightSwitch Community & Content Rollup–February 2012

LightSwitch Extensibility Toolkit for Visual Studio 11 Beta Released

LightSwitch Cosmopolitan Shell and Theme for VS 11 Beta

SharePoint:

What’s New in SharePoint Developer Tools for Visual Studio 11 Beta

Web Development:

Scott Hanselman: Visual Studio 11 Beta in Context

New Features for Web Development in Visual Studio 11 Beta

New time saving features for Web projects in Visual Studio 11 Beta

Visual Studio 11 Beta Page Inspector Tutorial live in asp.net

Visual Studio 11 Beta Razor editor issue workaround

Visual Studio 11 Beta HTML/CSS editor features

VS11 Beta JavaScript Feature comparison with VS2010 SP1

Windows 8 Platform:

Welcome to Windows 8 – The Consumer Preview

Running the Consumer Preview: system recommendations

Going behind the scenes building Windows 8

Web browsing in Windows 8 Consumer Preview with IE10

Windows 8 Development:

Welcome to the Windows 8 app developer blog

What’s changed for app developers since //build/ (part 1)

What’s changed for app developers since //build/ (part 2)

Migrating your apps from Developer Preview to Consumer Preview

Bring single sign-on and SkyDrive to your Windows 8 apps with the Live SDK

Combining XAML and DirectX

Windows Store:

Submitting your Windows 8 apps

Introducing the winners of the First Apps Contest

Licensing apps

Blend:

Insider’s view: Authoring XAML-based Metro style apps in Blend Beta

Blend’s Data Binding dialog: new features and UX refresh

Known Issue: XAML Designer in Visual Studio 11 Beta Crashes on Launch

Build HTML Metro style apps with Blend for Visual Studio 11 Beta

Visual Authoring for the Windows 8 Consumer Preview with Blend and Visual Studio

Blend Beta Known Issue: Menus do not render correctly when Windows 8 Basic theme is applied

Feedback:

The beta is an opportunity for us to get your feedback on Visual Studio 11 and .NET Framework 4.5 as we prepare to ship the final version. We really appreciate all the input that everyone has provided so far. We’ve been listening and reading all the responses that have come through on our feedback channels:

Questions on the Visual Studio or Windows forums
Bugs on the Visual Studio, LightSwitch, or Blend Connect sites (or with the Visual Studio Feedback Tool)
Suggestions on UserVoice

We also made a beta survey available today, where you can leave comments about your experience using the product.

Other Microsoft Releases:

In addition, here are a few other recent Microsoft releases to be aware of from the past month or so:

Update to .NET Framework 4:

Update 4.0.3 for the Microsoft .NET Framework 4

MVC 4 Beta Release on Feb 16, 2012:

Jon Galloway: ASP.NET MVC 4 Beta Released!

ScottGu: ASP.NET MVC 4 Beta

ScottGu: ASP.NET Web API (Part 1)

SQL Server 2012 Release on Mar 6, 2012:

Ted Kummert: The Data Explosion – Making Sense of it All

Microsoft Releases SQL Server 2012, Drives Advancements in Big Data

Team Foundation Server Licensing Changes:

In other news, this month we made it easier to get Team Foundation Server, by making Team Explorer Everywhere available free of charge, for users with a TFS CAL. We also made Team Foundation Server accessible to a wider group of participants by making TFS reports and the Operations Manager console available to all users, without requiring purchase of a TFS CAL. More details on these changes are available on Brian Harry’s blog.

Enjoy!

Follow me at twitter.com/jlzander.

Visual Studio 11 Beta Frequently Asked Questions (FAQ)

Jason Zander — Mon, 12 Mar 2012 23:45:00 GMT

On February 29^th, I announced the beta release of Visual Studio 11 and .NET Framework 4.5. It’s been encouraging to see the level of excitement around this release in the community, as well as the number of people who installed the bits and have been providing feedback. I’ve noticed some recurring questions about the release on my blog and other community channels, so I’d like to answer them here. I hope that you will find this information helpful as you use and evaluate the beta.

What are the supported operating systems for Visual Studio 11 Beta?

The supported operating systems for the Visual Studio 11 Beta products are available in the system requirements section of the respective Visual Studio 11 Beta download pages. Visual Studio 11 Express Beta for Windows 8 is specifically designed for Metro style app development, and therefore requires Windows 8 Consumer Preview (x86 or x64). Other downloads, like Team Explorer Everywhere 11 Beta, include support for additional operating systems as well. I recommend visiting the Visual Studio 11 Beta download pages for complete details. Again, please note that these are the Beta product specifications. We do not have details available for RTM at this time.

If you’re installing Visual Studio 11 Beta on Windows 8, please note that due to dependent components between Visual Studio and Windows this release, Visual Studio 11 Beta needs to be installed on Windows 8 Consumer Preview or Windows 8 Server Beta, and cannot be run on Windows 8 Developer Preview.

What changes are planned for the Visual Studio 11 user experience post-Beta?

We appreciate all the feedback that we’ve received on the Visual Studio 11 Beta user experience. You can find more information on these changes on the Visual Studio team blog. We are reading the comments and taking this feedback very seriously. The beta product is not the final experience and feedback from our community helps us to further evolve the experience to meet the needs of developers.

I’ve noticed that some of my Visual Studio 2010 icons changed after installing Visual Studio 11 Beta side by side. Is there any way to get them back?

Repairing Visual Studio 2010 will restore most Visual Studio 2010 icons back to their original images. The exception is .sln files which will keep their Visual Studio 11 appearance even after a repair.

What investments have you made in performance as part of Visual Studio 11 Beta?

With Visual Studio 11 we have made significant investments in improving the fundamental performance of Visual Studio. Key examples of improvements that have been made include lower Virtual Memory and responsiveness of Solution Load and Debugging. We’ve started posting specific examples and background information about these performance improvements on the Visual Studio team blog. Making Visual Studio a high performing environment is something the entire team is committed to. Performance is also something I believe requires a long term and continual investment. So please do send along your feedback and let us know what you think.

Why isn’t the installer customizable? Are you going to make it customizable for RTM?

We are currently investigating customization options. To give us more direct feedback, please feel free to weigh in on the User Voice thread on this topic.

What is the Visual Studio 11 roadmap leading up to RTM?

So far, we’ve shipped two pre-releases as part of the Visual Studio 11 product cycle, including Visual Studio 11 Developer Preview and last month’s Visual Studio 11 Beta. We expect to follow the typical milestones that will include Release Candidate (RC), Release to Manufacturing (RTM), and General Availability (GA). The timing of those milestones will be based on feedback, so please do make sure to install the beta and send yours if you have not already done so.

What are the supported upgrade paths?

This information is available in the “Upgrade paths” section of the Visual Studio 11 Beta “Go Live” webpage.

Can I install Visual Studio 11 Beta in my production environment?

Yes, Visual Studio 11 Beta ships with a “go live” license, which supports use in production. For more information about the “go live” license terms, please visit the Visual Studio 11 product website.

When will I be able to submit my app to the Windows Store?

The Windows Store isn't open yet for general submission. However you can still use Visual Studio 11 Beta to package and test your app locally while you wait for the Store to open for general submissions. I recommend that you watch the Windows Store blog for updates on this topic.

Which of my existing projects can I open in Visual Studio 11 Beta?

You can find the full list of Visual Studio 11 Beta supported project types on MSDN. Projects built using earlier RTM versions of Visual Studio (such as VS 2010, VS 2008, VS 2005) can be opened in Visual Studio 11 Beta. Visual Studio 11 provides multi-targeting support, so that you can continue to target earlier versions of the .NET Framework. Furthermore, we’ve improved the project compatibility support so that once you open your existing Visual Studio project in Visual Studio 11 Beta, you can continue working on it from Visual Studio 2010 SP1. This is a huge time saver for teams collaborating between Visual Studio 11 and Visual Studio 2010 SP1. (Please note that projects built using the Visual Studio 11 Developer Preview are not officially supported in Visual Studio 11 Beta, and may require copying over the necessary code files into a new project created in the Visual Studio 11 Beta.)

Can I use the Visual Studio 11 Beta to develop Windows Phone applications?

Visual Studio is designed to provide first class support for developing applications across the Microsoft platforms. However, the product cycles for Visual Studio and respective platforms are not always aligned. Given this, we don’t currently have Windows Phone support built into the Visual Studio 11 Beta. We are working closely with the Windows Phone team to enable this support, and you can find the latest information on this topic on the Windows Phone Developer blog.

Can I use the Visual Studio 11 Beta to develop and deploy Windows Azure applications?

For now, you will need to use Visual Studio 2010 for Azure development, which can be done side-by-side with Visual Studio 11 on the same machine. Detailed steps are available on the Windows Azure portal. Native support for the Azure SDK in Visual Studio 11 is coming in the future.

Stay tuned for.NET Framework 4.5 support in Windows Azure Guest OS families, which is also coming in the future.

Does Visual Studio 11 Beta include the async/await features from the Async CTP and Visual Studio 11 Developer Preview?

You can use Visual Studio 11 Beta to build apps that use async/await with .NET Framework 4.5. However, you are currently unable to use Visual Studio 11 Beta to build apps that use async/await with .NET Framework 4 or Silverlight 5. You can find more details on this issue, as well as future updates, on the Parallel Extensions team blog.

Where is Blend?

In Visual Studio 11 Beta, Blend is included as part of the installation of Visual Studio 11 Express Beta for Windows 8, Visual Studio 11 Professional Beta, Visual Studio 11 Premium Beta, and Visual Studio 11 Ultimate Beta.

Thanks again for all the great comments. Please keep the feedback coming!

Follow me at twitter.com/jlzander.

Welcome to the Beta of Visual Studio 11 and .NET Framework 4.5

Jason Zander — Wed, 29 Feb 2012 14:45:00 GMT

I’m happy to announce that Visual Studio 11 Beta, Team Foundation Server 11 Beta and .NET Framework 4.5 Beta are now available for download! Please visit the Visual Studio 11 Beta Downloads Page to install the bits today. MSDN Subscribers can access these releases directly from the MSDN Subscriber Download Page.

I’ve included an overview below of the product enhancements you can expect to see in Visual Studio 11 Beta, and recorded a Channel9 video to demonstrate some of them in action. For a complete list of “What’s New”, please visit the MSDN Library.

In coordination with the Visual Studio 11 Beta, today Steven Sinofsky announced the Windows 8 Consumer Preview. These bits are now live, and available for download.

Visual Studio 11 Features for Platform Development

Windows 8

Windows 8 brings a fresh new experience, where apps are full screen and touch enabled. One of the goals for Visual Studio 11 is to help developers build stunning Metro style apps. When you install Visual Studio 11 Beta with the Windows 8 Consumer Preview, you’ll have an opportunity to try out the new tools, which are designed to help you at each step of the way in your app development. You can start off with one of the ready-made Metro style app templates, available in JavaScript, C++, C# or Visual Basic. Next, use Blend for Visual Studio 11 Beta to style and design your application, whether you’re using HTML or XAML. Debug locally, on the simulator, or attached to another device, and use the profiling and code analysis tools to monitor your app’s quality. Finally, once your app is ready and the Store becomes available, you’ll be able to use Visual Studio to package and upload your app to the Windows Store. To learn more about developing Metro style apps, you can visit the Windows Dev Center, download the Metro style app samples, or check out the new Windows 8 app developer blog.

IDE

Visual Studio 11 Beta improves the developer experience in the IDE through reduction and simplification. You can find more information about the changes on the Visual Studio team blog. Beyond the clean and professional look, the overall environment has been streamlined with simplified toolbars, a lightweight Find dialog, and less tab clutter by previewing files rather than opening them during debugging. It’s now easier to manage the environment by rafting tabs on a second monitor, or by searching the IDE for a menu or command. There are a few language-specific additions, such as C++ code snippets and C++/CLI IntelliSense, as well as C++ code quality tools including code coverage, architecture explorer, and layer diagrams. JavaScript tooling support is also vastly improved, providing a first class experience in Visual Studio with breakpoints, brace matching, Go To Definition, and more.

We have heard a lot of great feedback so far on the new user experience for the IDE. I want to thank you for giving us that feedback. With the bits now being live I'd like to ask everyone to install the new version and spend some quality time working on your projects. My personal experience has been that is the best way to get a feeling for the changes. Once you have a chance to use it a few days please do continue to send us feedback based on that hands on experience.

Languages

Visual Studio 11 includes support in the box for the following languages: C#, Visual Basic, F#, C++ and JavaScript. The Microsoft implementation of JavaScript in Visual Studio 11 is compliant with the ECMAScript 5th Edition language specification. The C++ support in Visual Studio 11 includes the full C++ 11 standard library as well as new language features: stateless lambdas, SCARY iterators, range-based for loops, and scoped enumerations support. Visual C++ 11 also adds seamless access to Windows Runtime components through C++/CX as well as C++ Accelerated Massive Parallelism (C++ AMP), which enables hardware acceleration for the execution of your data parallel C++ code. For C# 5.0 and VB 11.0, the major innovation in this release has been around asynchronous development. In today’s industry, asynchronous development has become more and more important; however it’s still hard to do. Anders Hejlsberg and team have designed a new language syntax which allows you to write asynchronous C# and VB code that looks a lot like the synchronous version. F# helped inspire this direction, with the async language features it introduced in previous versions. In F# 3.0, the primary focus is information-rich programming, which enables you to program directly against data services, and is made possible by F# type providers and LINQ queries. For more information on Languages, please visit the following blogs: Visual C#, Visual Basic, Visual C++, Visual F#, JavaScript.

Graphics

Visual Studio 11 provides first class support for building graphically rich 2D/3D applications. It brings together the ability to debug DirectX graphics, to design and code DirectX shaders (HLSL), and to inspect and manipulate graphics assets (images and models). This is one of the areas I featured in my Developer Preview post, which is available here.

.NET Framework 4.5

In the Common Language Runtime and .NET Framework, there are a number of core improvements around performance, compatibility, garbage collection and other optimizations. There is also significant infrastructure work designed to enable the scenarios described above, such as Metro style app development using C# & VB (which required creating a .NET profile for Metro style apps), and the Async language features for C# & VB (which required creating new Task-returning versions of the .NET asynchronous APIs). TPL Dataflow is a new library in .NET Framework 4.5 for building parallel and concurrent applications. It builds on the Task type that was introduced in .NET 4.0, yet provides solutions for additional problems like agent-based models. Another addition in .NET 4.5 is portable libraries, which is the recommended way to create managed assemblies that can be referenced and run without modification on a variety of target platforms, including Windows 8, Windows Phone, Silverlight, XBOX 360 and .NET. Portable libraries existed previously as an add-in to Visual Studio 2010, and are now included as part of Visual Studio 11. For more information on .NET Framework 4.5 (including MEF, Networking, ASP.NET, EF, WPF, WCF, and WF), please see What’s New in the .NET Framework 4.5 Beta. Other good blog resources include: Scott Guthrie, Scott Hanselman, .NET Team, and Base Class Library (BCL) Team.

Business Application Development

LightSwitch development is now available as part of the Visual Studio 11 Beta Professional, Premium and Ultimate installations. There are quite a few LightSwitch enhancements in the Beta release. For one, LightSwitch projects can now access data from any Open Data Protocol (OData) data source, and LightSwitch services are now exposed as OData services that can be used by other applications like PowerPivot. You can also use Active Directory to assign the roles and permissions for different groups using the application. Other LightSwitch improvements in this release include new data types for percent and web address, more control over the formatting for numbers and dates, and the ability to display static text and images. More details are available on the LightSwitch blog.

SharePoint developer tools are also updated in Visual Studio 11 Beta, including new designers for list and content types, new templates for site columns and Silverlight web pages, as well as new options for deploying SharePoint sites. ALM features like performance profiling, unit testing, and IntelliTrace are now available for SharePoint development, and JavaScript debugging and IntelliSense have been enabled too. For more information, please visit the SharePoint developer team blog.

Visual Studio 11 Features for Application Lifecycle Management (ALM)

Each release since Visual Studio 2005 (when we first introduced ALM tools), we’ve considered which additional team members we can serve in order to best improve the project results. For example, in the Visual Studio 2010 release we introduced dedicated tooling to help manual testers integrate into the lifecycle alongside their counterparts on the programming team. For the Visual Studio 11 release, we’ve incorporated the stakeholder and operations roles. We’ve also provided tools to support agile practices in the team. And finally, we’ve sought to eliminate waste and improve collaboration across the team, through more frequent and more actionable feedback. Last year, when we disclosed our Visual Studio 11 ALM plans at TechEd, I shared some details regarding our plans in this space.

Lightweight Requirements

One of the first parts of getting a project started correctly is getting the requirements understood. "How many times have you built exactly what a customer asked for but not what they wanted?" When I ask this question I get a lot of smiles and nodding heads; it is a very common problem. We want the stakeholder to be a core part of the development cycle. Just like we want to get constant feedback from PM/development/testing during a scrum process, the feedback from our stakeholder is something we should be able to bring in quickly as well. To help with this we have introduced PowerPoint Storyboarding. PowerPoint Storyboarding is a PowerPoint add-in, and allows the development team to quickly mock up a design. This is a quick and easy way to specify the application requirements, and provides an opportunity for feedback even before the coding begins.

This model makes it very fast and easy to get to the intent of the software you are building and to share it with the customer. Because it is PowerPoint, you can simply view the mock up in slide show mode and even test out screen transitions. If you can get to an agreement quickly on the features and flow, then you can help eliminate wasted time spent actually building what might be the wrong thing.

Agile Development

Agile practices have become mainstream at this point. When I ask an audience who is using a practice like scrum I easily get over 90% of hands. Indeed on our own team we have gotten to that level for the development of Visual Studio and the runtimes. With this release of VS we have added even more support to help your team run the project using scrum.

Editing your project can be done directly in a browser making it easy for all team members to access. With the web access you can groom the product backlog, assign items to sprints, and decompose into user stories and tasks. Each sprint can be planned taking into account the duration and capacity of the team. You can view reports by sprint or by team member capacity to see how the project is tracking, and adjust as necessary. There is also a task board view available, which is ideal for standups, and makes it easy to check in and update on the spot. And of course since everything is backed by TFS, then items can either be retired through the web interface or included as part of a check-in.

There are a few different charts available for reviewing project status, such as the burndown charts and capacity bars, so that you can visualize and evaluate the progress in multiple ways.

Feedback

As mentioned under Storyboarding, our goal is to include stakeholders (customers) as part of the development cycle. Once we start getting working software, we want to make it possible for stakeholders to provide frequent and actionable feedback. Engineers submit a feedback request through Team Web Access, and the stakeholder receives an email with the request. The email invitation includes a link that launches the new Microsoft Feedback Client, and allows the stakeholder to provide feedback including rich text, images, video and more.

The Feedback Client pins itself to the left side of the screen, making it easy to use the working software and provide notes at the same time. Like the manual testing tools we released with Visual Studio 2010, the Feedback Client will record video and audio as well as the actions the user takes (similar to the one-way mirror user testing we do on the Microsoft campus only easier to get going). The key goal is to get high quality feedback during development rather than having it wait to the very end. This minimizes the amount of re-work helping to bring the project in on time and with better cost.

Testing

Testers will enjoy a variety of improvements in this release. Microsoft Test Manager 11 has been enhanced to embrace exploratory testing (sometimes called agile testing). With exploratory testing you can find bugs not often caught with traditional formal test case management. The beauty of Microsoft Test Manager 11 is that even with exploratory testing you still get the same level of rich data capture while you are conducting this type of testing. Therefore, when you do find a bug you can easily file it along with the relevant contextual information to provide developers with insight into what you were doing and the state of the application at the time you discovered the bug. Microsoft Test Manager 11 continues to offer great support for formal test case management as well, and you can blend the two approaches in your test plans.

Lab Management has also been greatly simplified in this release with the consolidation of agents and the introduction of standard environments, which allow you to benefit from build-deploy-test workflows without the dependency on Hyper-V or SCVMM. You can now use VMWare, physical machines, or other virtualization stacks to create your environments in a matter of minutes. Please visit Brian Harry’s blog for more information.

Debugging and Quality Tools

With Visual Studio 11, we now provide the ability for you to include additional adapters to support 3^rd party unit testing frameworks such as xUnit.net, NUnit, and others. The new Unit Test Explorer will showcase all of the tests across your solution regardless of which testing framework they were written for. Visual Studio 11 will continue to provide support for traditional unit tests written using MSTest, and adds support for writing tests in C++ as well.

IntelliTrace can now be used to collect traces on machines that don’t have Visual Studio installed. This means that you can now use IntelliTrace to debug issues that occur on production servers. This was a popular request after Visual Studio 2010, so I’m glad we were able to make it possible in Visual Studio 11.

Another interesting tool that we’ve added for developers in Visual Studio 11 is code clone analysis, which examines your solution for similar code fragments. After identifying clones, you can make sure to consistently edit them going forward, or better yet, refactor in order to save on future maintenance.

Finally, in Visual Studio 11 we’ve greatly improved the code review experience. We’ve included a new Code Review page in Team Explorer to request and manage reviews, as well as an enhanced “Diff” view, which makes it easier to review changes. You can find more information on these in my Developer Preview announcement as well as Brian Harry’s blog post on Merge enhancements in TFS 11.

Team Collaboration

Both Team Foundation Server and Team Web Access were significantly revamped in this release. As with the Visual Studio IDE, you’ll notice a clean and professional user interface. The first thing you’ll see is the redesigned Team Explorer, with a new search box, and with nodes now displayed as distinct pages such as My Work and Pending Changes. Key details from the Build Explorer window also appear more prominently in the new Team Explorer. The My Work page is a useful place to view and manage your “To Do” list. It can also help you suspend and restore the context for specific tasks. The Pending Changes page has been streamlined to remove clutter, and make it easier to work with. Local Workspaces have been added, which make it much easier to work with Team Foundation Server offline. They also make it simpler to work with version-controlled files using 3^rd party editors outside of Visual Studio, so that you no longer need to explicitly check out files before editing them elsewhere. For more details on these TFS 11 enhancements, please see Develop Code for a Backlog Item, and Fix a Bug on MSDN, What’s New in the VS TFS 11 Dev Preview by the ALM Team, or The New Team Explorer in TFS 11 by Brian Harry.

“Go Live” License

With the Visual Studio 11 Beta milestone here, we are happy to be one step closer to the final release. Visual Studio 11 Beta meets our “Go Live” quality bar for pre-release software. Therefore we are recommending it for use in production, and supporting it as “Go Live” release. For more information on the “Go Live” terms and how to get support if you need it, please visit the Visual Studio 11 Beta website.

Upgrade & Compatibility

We expect that many of you will want to try out your existing Visual Studio 2010 SP1 solutions on Visual Studio 11 Beta. The compatibility improvements in Visual Studio 11 will make it easier to work with your existing Visual Studio assets, without doing any “upgrades” of project files. In the majority of cases, you can use Visual Studio 11 and also continue collaborating on projects with your teammates using Visual Studio 2010 SP1. More details are available in the MSDN Library. (Note: This kind of “roundtripping” is supported between Visual Studio 2010 SP1 and Visual Studio 11. Projects from previous versions like Visual Studio 2008, will need to be upgraded to Visual Studio 11.)

Those of you who would like to start preparing for TFS 11 may want to review the Team Foundation Server Upgrade and Planning guides. You can find these and other Visual Studio 11 readiness materials on the Visual Studio ALM Rangers solutions page.

Start Coding

We’ve collected a range of resources to help you get up and running with the Beta. Be sure to visit our Dev Centers and related websites for the latest reference materials, blog feeds, and more.

Here are some additional blogs to watch for Beta announcements: Somasegar, Brian Harry, ALM & TFS, Visual Studio, BlendInsider, Building Windows 8, Windows 8 app developer, and Windows Store for developers.

Send Feedback

We can’t wait to hear from you, and learn more about your experience using the Beta. Here are some ways to connect with us:

Ask a question on the Visual Studio or Windows forums
File a bug on the Visual Studio, LightSwitch, or Blend Connect sites (or with the Visual Studio Feedback Tool)
Submit a suggestion on UserVoice

Enjoy!

Follow me at twitter.com/jlzander.

Sneak Preview of Visual Studio 11 and .NET Framework 4.5 Beta

Jason Zander — Thu, 23 Feb 2012 18:00:00 GMT

Today we’re giving a “sneak peek” into the upcoming beta release of Visual Studio 11 and .NET Framework 4.5. Soma has announced on his blog that the beta will be released on February 29^th! We look forward to seeing what you will build with the release, and will be including a “Go Live” license with the beta, so that it can be used in production environments.

Visual Studio 11 Beta features a clean, professional developer experience. These improvements were brought about through a thoughtful reduction of the user interface, and a simplification of common developer workflows. They were also based upon insights gathered by our user experience research team. I think you will find it both easier to discover and navigate code, as well as search assets in this streamlined environment. For more information, please visit the Visual Studio team blog.

In preparation for the beta, today we’re also announcing the Visual Studio 11 Beta product lineup, which will be available for download next week. You can learn about these products on the Visual Studio product website. One new addition you will notice is Team Foundation Server Express Beta, which is free collaboration software that we’re making available for small teams. Please see Brian Harry’s blog for the complete announcement and more details on this new product.

In the Visual Studio 11 release, we’re providing a continuous flow of value, allowing teams to use agile processes, and gather feedback early and often. Storyboarding and Feedback Manager enable development teams to react rapidly to change, allowing stakeholder requirements to be captured and traced throughout the entire delivery cycle. Visual Studio 11 also introduces support for teams working together in the DevOps cycle. IntelliTrace in production allows teams to debug issues that occur on production servers, which is a key capability for software teams delivering services.

I encourage you to view the presspass story with additional footage from today’s news events, including a highlight video and product screenshots. Then stay tuned for an in-depth overview of the release with the general availability announcement on February 29^th.

Enjoy!

Follow me at twitter.com/jlzander.

Join me at the ALM & Test days in Italy

Jason Zander — Fri, 20 Jan 2012 01:10:00 GMT

I’m looking forward to my upcoming trip to Italy next week, where I’ll have an opportunity to speak at Microsoft events, and spend time with customers and partners. I wanted to share my plans with you, in case we have an opportunity to connect.

The Microsoft events where I will be keynoting are the ALM & Test days. These are single day events, being held in Milan on January 24^th and Rome on January 26^th. The events will focus on Application Lifecycle Management, and will provide useful resources for both business decision makers and technical decision makers. In my keynote, I will describe the Microsoft ALM Strategy. This will be a good opportunity to learn about the direction we’re taking with our Microsoft ALM products, and gain insight into the thinking behind it. I will also share information on what you can expect to see in the next Visual Studio release.

Following my presentation, there will be talks offering insights and learning’s from real-world examples of implementing ALM in the enterprise including CIO interviews, customer panels, and detailed sessions on end-to-end integration by expert partner teams. I look forward to meeting everyone!

Follow me at twitter.com/jlzander.

January 17th What’s Happening Around Visual Studio

Jason Zander — Wed, 18 Jan 2012 02:08:00 GMT

I hope everyone had a great holiday season, and is off to a good new year. I enjoyed taking some time off to spend with my family.

I wanted to share some of what’s been going on in the Visual Studio team since BUILD.

In October we released the Microsoft “Roslyn” CTP. Roslyn is a long lead project (post-Visual Studio 11), in which we’re rewriting the C# and Visual Basic compilers in C# and Visual Basic! In the process, we’re opening up these compilers as APIs that are accessible to developers. This is a significant shift from traditional black box compilers, where source code goes in and assemblies come out. One advantage of opening up these compilers is that it will make it easier to create amazing tools for these languages. We’re looking forward to seeing what you will build with this support. For more information on “Roslyn”, please visit http://msdn.com/en-us/roslyn.

In November we released the latest Windows Azure SDK for .NET, which included updates to the Windows Azure Tools for Visual Studio 2010 and the Windows Azure Emulator. If you’ve been targeting Windows Azure, a couple of improvements you’ll enjoy are the Publish Windows Azure Application wizard and command-line build support. For the full list of changes, please see the Windows Azure team blog post or the Windows Azure documentation. If you’re new to Windows Azure, there are also some great new resources to get you started, such as the redesigned Windows Azure website at http://www.windowsazure.com/. If you’re looking for hands-on labs, slides, and demos, be sure to also download the Windows Azure Training Kit. For presentations, I recommend watching the session videos from the recent Learn Windows Azure event in December.

Following the Windows Azure release in November, we released a refresh of our Team Foundation Service (Team Foundation Server running on Windows Azure) in December. Team Foundation Service is the fastest and easiest way to get up and running on a team project. Team Foundation Service preview has been running as a private preview since April, and with public invitation codes since September at BUILD. The most recent enhancements in the December release include navigation updates, richer homepages, simplified web UI for small teams, performance, email notifications, forecast lines, and in-tile taskboard editing. These changes are in response to feedback from our early adopters, and make the tool even more helpful and easy to use. We are very interested in your feedback at this point in the product development (both on UserVoice and Connect), so we can make the right improvements as we develop the product. To learn more about the Team Foundation Service preview, please visit Brian Harry’s blog, the ALM Team blog, or Channel9.

December was a big month for TFS. In addition to the Team Foundation Service preview, we also released an update of the Team Foundation Server Power Tools. While the Team Foundation Service preview is an early look at a future technology, the Team Foundation Server Power Tools are an extension to the released product, Team Foundation Server 2010. I’ve blogged about power tools before, and explained that we release them to try out new ideas or answer common requests more quickly than in the next product release. In the December TFS Power Tools release we focused on developers using TFS from Eclipse. We want to make sure that TFS is accessible to developers using any tools, and therefore we add support to additional tools beyond Visual Studio, where it makes sense. Eclipse users can download the December release, and get additional features including TFS alerts, work item templates, and improved Find in Source Control. Another improvement available in the December release is 64-bit MSSCCI support.

In November, I also participated in the ALM Summit which was held at the Microsoft Headquarters in Redmond Washington. This event is a great opportunity to discuss application lifecycle management challenges, learn how to apply Microsoft’s solutions, and pick up best practices from industry experts. At the Summit I gave a presentation on The Microsoft Vision for ALM, which you can find recorded on Channel9. In this talk, I shared the trends I’m seeing in the industry, and how we’re advancing the Visual Studio product offerings to address them. If you missed this event and are interested in ALM, I’d definitely recommend viewing this and the other session videos available online.

Enjoy!

Follow me at twitter.com/jlzander.

Announcing Visual Studio 11 Developer Preview

Jason Zander — Wed, 14 Sep 2011 17:30:00 GMT

Today in the BUILD keynote I had the opportunity to show some of the new functionality in Microsoft® Visual Studio® 11 Developer Preview and Microsoft® Team Foundation Server Preview. MSDN subscribers can download the previews today as well as the new release of .NET Framework 4.5 Developer Preview; general availability is on Friday, September 16.

Download Visual Studio 11, Team Foundation Server 11, and several other components today (MSDN Subscribers Only Downloads).
Friday 10:00 AM PDT general availability for Visual Studio 11 and Team Foundation Server 11 can be downloaded.

Some exciting announcements are being made here at BUILD. Visual Studio 11 provides an integrated development experience that spans the entire lifecycle of software creation from architecture to code creation, testing and beyond. This release adds support for Windows 8 and HTML 5, enabling you to target platforms across devices, services and the cloud. Integration with Team Foundation Server enables the entire team to collaborate throughout the development cycle to create quality applications.

.NET 4.5 has focused on top developer requests across all our key technologies, and includes new features for Asynchronous programming in C# and Visual Basic, support for state machines in Windows Workflow, and increased investments in HTML5 and CSS3 in ASP.NET.

We’ve shared a lot at BUILD already, for more on the future of Windows development I suggest you take a look at Steven Sinofsky and S. Somasegar’s blogs. More details on Team Foundation Server including the new service announced at BUILD and how we’re helping teams be more productive can be found on Brian Harry’s blog.

Quick Tour around Visual Studio 11 Features

Visual Studio 11 has several new features, all designed to provide an integrated set of tools for delivering great user and application experiences; whether working individually or as part of a team. Let me highlight a few:

Develop Metro style Apps for Windows 8

Visual Studio 11 includes a set of templates that get you started quickly developing Metro style applications with JavaScript, C#, VB or C++. The blank Application template provides the simplest starting point with a default project structure that includes sample resources and images. The Grid View, Split View, and Navigation templates are designed to provide a starting point for more complex user interfaces.

From Visual Studio 11, seamlessly open up your Metro style app with JavaScript in Expression Blend to add the style and structure of your application.

Due to the dynamic nature of HTML it is often difficult to see how a web page is going to look unless it is running. Blend’s innovative interactive design mode enables you to run your app on the design surface as a live app instead of a static visual layout.

Enhancements for Game Development

We have added Visual Studio Graphics tools to help game developers become more productive, making it easier to build innovative games. Visual Studio 11 provides access to a number of resource editing, visual design, and visual debugging tools for writing 2D / 3D games and Metro style applications. Specifically, Visual Studio Graphics includes tools for:

Viewing and basic editing of 3D models in Visual Studio 11.

Viewing and editing of images and textures with support for alpha channels and transparency.

Visually designing shader programs and effect files.

Debugging and diagnostics of DirectX based output.

Code Clone Analysis

Visual Studio has historically provided tools that enable a developer to improve code quality by refactoring code. However this process depends on the developer to determine where such reusable code is likely to occur. The Code-Clone Analysis tool in Visual Studio 11 examines your solution looking for logic that is duplicated, enabling you to factor this code out into one or more common methods. The tool does this very intelligently; it does not just search for identical blocks of code, rather it searches for semantically similar constructs using heuristics developed by Microsoft Research.

This technique is useful if you are correcting a bug in a piece of code and you want to find out whether the same bug resulting from the same programmatic idiom occurs elsewhere in the project.

Code Review Workflow with Team Explorer

Visual Studio 11 Preview works hand in hand with Team Foundation Server 11 to provide best in class application lifecycle management. Visual Studio 11 facilities collaboration is by enabling developers to request and perform code reviews through using Team Explorer. This feature defines a workflow in Team Foundation Server that saves project state and routes review requests as work items to team members. These workflows are independent of any specific process or methodology, so you can incorporate code reviews at any convenient point in the project lifecycle.

The Request Review link in the My Work pane enables you to create a new code review task and assign it to one or more other developers.

The reviewer can accept or decline the review, and respond to any messages or queries associated with the code review, add annotations and more. Visual Studio 11 displays the code by using a “Diff” format, showing the original code and the changes made by the developer requesting the review. This feature enables the reviewer to quickly understand the scope of the changes and work more efficiently.

Exploratory Testing and Enhanced Unit Testing

As development teams become more flexible and agile, they demand adaptive tools that still ensure a high commitment to quality. The Exploratory Testing feature is an adaptive tool for agile testing that enables you to test without performing formal test planning. You can now directly start testing the product without spending time writing test cases or composing test suites. When you start a new testing session, the tool generates a full log of your interaction with the application under test. You can annotate your session with notes, and you can capture the screen at any point and add the resulting screen shot to your notes. You can also attach a file providing any additional information if required. With the exploratory testing tool you can also:

File actionable bugs fast. The Exploratory Testing tool enables you to generate a bug report, and the steps that you performed to cause unexpected behavior are automatically included in the bug report.

Create test cases. You can generate test cases based on the steps that caused the bugs to appear.

Manage exploratory testing sessions. When testing is complete, you can return to Microsoft Test Manager, which saves the details of the testing session and includes information such as the duration, which new bugs were filed, and which test cases were created.

What’s New in .NET 4.5

.NET 4.5 has focused on our top developer requests. Across ASP.NET, the BCL, MEF, WCF, WPF, Windows Workflow, and other key technologies, we’ve listened to developers and added functionality in .NET 4.5. Important examples include state machine support in Windows Workflow, and improved support for SQL Server and Windows Azure in ADO.NET. ASP.NET has increased investments in HTML5, CSS3, device detection, page optimization, and the NuGet package system, as well as introduces new functionality with MVC4. Learn more at Scott Guthrie’s blog.

.NET 4.5 also helps developers write faster code. Support for Asynchronous programming in C# and Visual Basic enables developers to easily write client UI code that doesn’t block, and server code that scales more efficiently. The new server garbage collector reduces pause times, and new features in the Parallel Computing Platform enable Dataflow programming and other improvements.

Start Coding

Visual Studio 11 includes several new features which will help developers collaborate more effectively while creating exciting experiences for their users. Here are some are some resources to help you get started.

Enjoy!

Microsoft® Visual Studio® LightSwitch™ 2011 is Available Today

Jason Zander — Tue, 26 Jul 2011 17:00:00 GMT

I am happy to say that as of 10:00am PDT today, Microsoft Visual Studio LightSwitch 2011 is available! MSDN subscribers can download LightSwitch immediately and others can download the 90-day trial. General availability is on Thursday, July 28th.

Get Visual Studio LightSwitch 2011 (MSDN Subscribers). If you’re not a MSDN Subscriber, you can download a 90 day trial.
Thursday’s 10:00am PDT general availability information can be found on the LightSwitch site.

Visual Studio LightSwitch 2011 is a simplified, self-service development tool that enables you to create business applications quickly and easily for the desktop and cloud. I first announced LightSwitch at the VS Live conference in August 2010 and have since written a few posts including detailed tutorials. For those of you unfamiliar with it, it starts with the premise that most business applications consist of data and the screens that users interact with. LightSwitch simplifies attaching to data with data source wizards or creating data tables with table designers. It also includes screen templates for common tasks so you can create clean interfaces for your applications without being a designer. Basic applications can be written without a line of code. However, you can add custom code that is specific to your business problem without having to worry about setting up classes and methods.

As part of today's announcement, I've put together a video that highlights some of the features within LightSwitch, along with sessions on how to build applications using it.

Visual Studio LightSwitch Key Features

LightSwitch provides several features to streamline development of business applications. Some of the key features are:

Starter Kits
To jump start your development we created starter kits for common types of business applications. Check out the available starter kits to find the one that best fits your needs and use it as the starting point for your business application. Downloaded starter kits appear in your installed templates.

Publish to Azure
Take your LightSwitch applications to the cloud by publishing to Azure directly from the IDE. You don’t need to rewrite your application; simply change the target environment, follow the steps and then your application is published to Azure.

Azure publishing does not only include running your application from the cloud— you can also distribute it from Azure. Desktop applications can be shared from a single location for others to download.

LightSwitch Extensions
LightSwitch applications are extensible, giving you the flexibility to update your application in the future with minimal disruptions. Extension points are business data types, screen templates, data sources, themes, shells and custom controls. In addition to being able to create your own extensions, our launch partners, ComponentOne, DevExpress, First Floor Software, Infragistics and RSSBus, are making a variety of extensions available for use today. You can get more details on the extensions each partner created on the LightSwitch site or from within the Extension Manager in LightSwitch.

Select the extension for use in your current project or for use in all future LightSwitch applications.

LightSwitch extensions require minimal effort to include them in an application. Often selecting them from a drop-down menu is sufficient, or for more advanced ones may require configuration or some code.

Once the extension is added you can use it within your application.

Summary

Thanks to all of you who downloaded pre-release builds of the product and provided your feedback. Your feedback has been invaluable to us.

You can find additional information, training resources, and guidelines for moving your existing Beta 2 projects forward on the LightSwitch team blog. Here is an additional list of helpful links:

LightSwitch Site
LightSwitch Developer Center (one-stop-shop for training content and the community)
LightSwitch on Facebook
LightSwitch on Twitter (hash tag: #LightSwitch)
LightSwitch Readme
LightSwitch Forums
LightSwitch Connect Site (feedback)

Enjoy!

Jason

June 28th What's Happening Around Visual Studio

Jason Zander — Tue, 28 Jun 2011 18:51:00 GMT

A quick recap of what's been happening on the team.

Unit Testing Windows Phone 7 applications - Amit Chatterjee continues his series of posts as he builds his Chronometer Windows Phone 7 application.
TFS 2010 SP1 Cumulative Update 1 Available - Learn about the latest cumulative update from the TFS team. The update prereqs SP1 and should be installed on TFS application tiers and build servers.
Visual Studio ALM Rangers - Just recently, the Ranger community launched two sets of guidance that I recommend you check out. The Visual Studio Build Customization Guidance offers scenario based guidance on versioning, code signing, and branching. The Visual Studio Lab Management Guidance is designed for professional deployment of Lab Management in production environments.
Agile Project Management in Visual Studio ALM V.Next - Brian Harry walks through how the TFS team adopted Scrum for their feature team level development.
Kinect SDK for PC - VB Samples available - Download Kinect for Windows SDK beta and start coding using the available VB samples.
The Importance of Feedback in Software Development - Learn how by increasing the role of interation and feedback in your development process you can build better software.
VS ALM Library Updates on MSDN for May 2011 - Check out the latest content published in our Visual Studio Library.
Make Agile Work for you in TFS 2010 - Chris Adams recently wrote an article for MSDN Magazine that takes you on the journey of his team's adoption of Agile practices using Team Foundation Server 2010.
Micro-framework v4.2 Support for Visual Basic - Check out how VB developers can now be microcontroller developers.
New QFE for Visual Studio 2010 testing tools - The team recently made available a QFE that fixes some issues reported by our customers. Check out the team blog for a summary of issues fixed.
Tips and Tricks for Using the Screen Designer - Sheel Shah walks through how to get the most out of your screen designer using LightSwitch.

Enjoy!

Follow me at twitter.com/jlzander.

Please welcome Erich Gamma to the Visual Studio team!

Jason Zander — Mon, 06 Jun 2011 12:00:00 GMT

Today I am thrilled to announce that Erich Gamma will be joining the Visual Studio team as a Microsoft Distinguished Engineer! Erich’s contributions have had a huge impact on the software industry. Erich has a passion for shipping high quality, elegant software, something he shared with the community as co-author of Design Patterns. He has always had a passion for building tools to make development more productive and pleasant. Together with Kent Beck he developed the JUnit unit test framework. He was one of the key technical leads of the Eclipse project and he has lead the Eclipse Java Development tools. Recently his focus was on making teams more effective. He was an initial member of the Jazz project and the technical lead of Rational Team Concert. Finally, Erich has worked to bring teams together across the application life cycle and he was the lead of Rational's Collaborative Lifecycle Management effort.

Erich will continue to live and work out of Zurich, Switzerland where we will be opening a small Visual Studio development lab with Erich as the lead. Erich will join the lab in early August. For those who are interested in applying for positions with the new Zurich lab you can send mail to CHDevDiv@Microsoft.com to get details.

The Visual Studio team is passionate about inspiring developers to create great software. We want to make developers successful and enable them to continuously deliver value. We are constantly looking for better ways to accomplish these goals. I’m very excited to have someone like Erich who shares our passion join the team. Please join me in welcoming Erich to the Visual Studio team!

Jason

May 27th What's Happening Around Visual Studio

Jason Zander — Fri, 27 May 2011 19:03:00 GMT

Last week was Teched North America in Atlanta, GA. It was a great event and continues to be one of my favorite conferences because we get the chance to engage with both developers and IT professionals. In addition to my announcement of our ALM Roadmap in Visual Studio vNext, there has been quite a bit of videos and blogs posted that I want to make sure you've had a chance to check out.

While Channel 9 has all the TechEd sessions available - here are a handful of sessions to help get you started:

Keynote Address (Robert Wahbe, Jason Zander)
The Future of Microsoft Visual Studio Application Lifecycle Management (Cameron Skinner)
Building Business Applications with Microsoft Visual Studio LightSwitch (Robert Green)
Visual Studio IDE Futures (Weston Hutchins)
How We Do Language Design at Microsoft (Alex Turner, Donald Syme, Lisa Feigenbaum, Lucian Wischik)
Team Foundation Server for Everyone (Martin Woodward)
Manual Testing with Microsoft Test Manager 2010 (Brian Keller)
ALM for C++ in Microsoft Visual Studio 2010 (Terry Leeper)

There have also been more details behind the announcements in a few of our team blogs.

Connecting Development and Operations - Learn more about the TFS-SCOM connector, our first step in the journey of connecting the development and operations team together.
3 Easy Ways to Learn About Visual Studio nNext Application Lifecycle Management - Check out Brian Keller's post that is a great help for getting up to speed on what we announced at Teched NA.
ALM for C++ in Visual Studio vNext at TechEd NA 2011 - Learn about some of the new features that will be especially useful to C++ developer teams.

Additional things happening around the Visual Studio team:

Windows Phone Developer Tools 7.1 Beta - Download these tools and start building apps and games. The beta includes Visual Basic support for XNA and Windows Phone. To learn more check out the Visual Basic Support in XNA Game Studio 4 article and the team's post regarding VB support for the XNA platform.
Visual Studio Toolbox - Check out Robert Green's new series on Channel 9 that focuses on our tooling with the goal of helping you become a more productive developer.
TFS and Project Server Resources - Take advantage of the recent resources (videos, virtual machine) the team has made available to help you manage enterprise development projects.
Configuration matrix testing using Visual Studio Lab Management - Learn how to test your application in both IE and Firefox.
Import Data While Running a LightSwitch Web Application - Check out Matt Sampson's tips and tricks that makes this seemlingly tricky process pretty easy to understand.
Happy 20th Birthday Visual Basic! - Check out all the stories and best wishes from the community - Happy Birthday VB!

Enjoy!

Follow me at twitter.com/jlzander.

Announcing ALM Roadmap in Visual Studio vNext at Teched

Jason Zander — Mon, 16 May 2011 14:04:00 GMT

I get a lot of questions about the future of Visual Studio; while I can't talk about everything we're doing I am excited because today at Teched North America, I announced our vision for Application Lifecycle Management (ALM) in the next version of Visual Studio. Our vision for ALM can be broken down into three main themes:

Building on the momentum of Visual Studio 2010. If you haven’t tried out Visual Studio 2010, you can take it out for a test drive.
Accelerating agile adoption – you can find great existing support today with more to come.
Linking development and operations – ensuring a tight interaction between dev and ops.

When we asked people what the biggest problem they faced in successfully delivering software, they identified the need for better collaboration. We know that building software takes a team of people including developers, testers, architects, project planners, and more. Out of this observation, we created the strategy for our ALM offering which focuses on helping people collaborate in very tightly integrated ways:

Collaboration – focus on the flow of value between team members no matter what role.
Actionable Feedback – when feedback is required between team members, it should be in a form which is directly applicable to solving the problem at hand. For example when a tester communicates a defect to development it should include videos, screen shots, configuration information, and even an IntelliTrace log making it easier to find and fix the root problem.
Diverse Work Styles – provide the best possible tool for each team member whether that is the Visual Studio IDE, the web browser, SharePoint, Office, or dedicated tooling.
Transparent Agile Processes – Enable all of the above to work on a “single source of truth” from engineering tasks through project status. TFS provides this core that brings together all team members and their tools.

VS2005, VS2008, and VS2010 have all delivered new value following this path. For example VS2010 added deep Architect <-> Developer and Test <-> Developer interaction through solutions like architectural discovery, layering enforcement, automated testing, and IntelliTrace.

In the keynote today, I talked about how we have continued on this path by incorporating two additional important roles: stakeholders and operations. Even though this diagram greatly simplifies the flows throughout the application lifecycle, it captures the essence of planning, building, and managing software:

There are a number of scenarios that span the next version of Visual Studio for ALM. These scenarios improve the creation, maintenance and support of software solutions by focusing on improving the workflow across the entire team as well as across the entire lifecycle.

Agile Planning Tools – create transparency across the planning process and full team participation through solutions like the new backlog and task board.
Lightweight Requirements – a natural way to capture and receive feedback on requirements early in the process.
Stakeholder Feedback – working code which matches the expectations of stakeholders.
Continuous Testing – unit test coverage ensures quality in the final product.
Agile Quality Assurance – increased code quality with code review support, enhanced unit testing frameworks and new exploratory testing support.
Enhanced User Experience – more time ‘in the zone’, through improved experiences for day-to-day tasks.
Aligning Development with Operations – increased connections and insight between the operations and development teams lowering the time it takes to fix a bug in production.

Here are just a few of the screenshots from the demos today – a link to my keynote is below.

Agile Planning
Planning a successful release requires making a lot of tradeoffs. We need to decide what core customer problems we want to solve and in what priority (product backlog). We only have so many resources available to us which must be factored in (capacity planning). Once we’ve determined what comes next we actually have to plan out the work (sprint planning). Finally we need to track our progress against the plan and make adjustments as we go (managing tasks). With Visual Studio vNext we have introduced a new web based interface that implements the scrum model providing solutions for all of these issues. Because the solution is built on TFS, the data is easily accessed in your favorite tool of choice. You can see some examples here:

Lightweight Requirements
How often have you built exactly what the customer asked for but not what they wanted? In general customers are working hard to provide their requests and the engineering team is working equally hard to make them happy. At the same time there are a lot of steps involved and each point can introduce the potential to diverge between the stakedholder and the engineering team. Visual Studio vNext provides a natural way to work through stakeholder feedback using something we are all familiar with, PowerPoint. Using the Storyboarding plug-in for PowerPoint the product owner can quickly mock up the solution and get feedback directly from the customer before impelmentation begins. Because the solution leverages PowerPoint, you can show linking between screens in your application, demonstrate user actions (like touch), and easily share your proposal. The following screen shots demonstrate some of these concepts:

Stakeholder Feedback
The longer the time between a user asking for a feature and the team delivering, the more likely we are to see disconnects. Ideally we would get feedback on a regular basis to make sure what is being built is what was asked for. To help with this, Visual Studio vNext introduces a new feedback tool (based on the Test Professional support VS2010) which allows a product owner to use the new features and provide actionable feedback. The tool collects video and audio of the feedback session as well as the action logs (which can be turned into test cases). This kind of rich feedback done in a timely way keeps everyone in sync.

Continuous Testing
Having great unit test coverage is one of the best ways to ensure quality in the final product. With Visual Studio vNext we are enabling you to use your favorite unit testing framework integrated deeply into the IDE. We will support MS Test, xunit, and nunit with vNext. You will also be able to target both .NET and native C++ code. Adding test frameworks is an extensibility point as well so if you don’t see your favorite one listed here, you can easily add it.

Agile Quality Assurance
Once our new software has been finished by the development team we need to do our quality assurance passes. This will include a set of functional tests that can utilize the manual and coded testing features of VS2010. For Visual Studio vNext we also wanted to provide a way for a QA professional to explore the product and look for additional issues. The new Exploratory Testing tool provides a great way to do this. As you explore the product the tool records the entire session (audio and video), the action log of steps taken, etc. From the tool you can create a new test case, bug, take snapshots, and take detailed notes. The filtering tool also allows you to select the steps that led to finding a defect. All of these are examples of providing actionable feedback.

System Center and Visual Studio Team Foundation Server 2010

The relationship between the application development and the IT operations teams is critical. We’ve just released a CTP of the new connector between System Center and Visual Studio Team Foundation Server (TFS) 2010 that facilitates the alignment between development and operations. The connector enables an operations team to assign application performance monitoring and diagnostic information gathered by System Center to TFS for immediate attention and application incident triage by the engineering team. Using this support, the operations team can easily capture key data (like call stacks) and automatically deliver them to the engineering team (another example of actionable feedback). Microsoft will deliver a CTP of the new connector later today. Be sure to check it out and let us know what you think!

Find Out More

The “Visual Studio vNext: Application Lifecycle Management” whitepaper is available today. This is a comprehensive whitepaper that covers these topics in much more detail. I recommend you check it out, along with the Visual Studio Roadmap.

The best way to take advantage of the benefits of ALM is to start using Visual Studio 2010 today and obtain an MSDN subscription. Additional helpful links to get you started can be found on our websites:

Visual Studio website – product information
Visual Studio Dev Center – technical and community information

A video of my keynote will be available later on the Teched North America site:

Check out Cameron Skinner, Brian Harry, and Amit Chatterjee’s blogs over the next couple of months for more details on ALM in Visual Studio vNext.

Enjoy!