This week is VSTS week on Channel 9, and today we have three new videos published about the work we are doing within the Architecture product for Visual Studio 2010.  We are very excited about what we are working, and would love your feedback:

http://channel9.msdn.com/posts/VisualStudio/Cameron-Skinner-Visual-Studio-Team-System-2010-Architecture

http://channel9.msdn.com/posts/VisualStudio/Top-down-design-with-Visual-Studio-Team-System-2010

http://channel9.msdn.com/posts/VisualStudio/Bottom-up-Design-with-Visual-Studio-Team-System-2010-Architect

Today we announce that Microsoft has joined the OMG.  Those involved in modeling for sometime will know how big this news is for both Microsoft and modeling in general.  And since I have been working on UML tools within VSTS for sometime now, it is important news to me as well. 

Press Release

Bob Mugia’s Interview

Join members of the Visual Studio Team System product group to discuss features available in Team Foundation Server, Team Suite, Architecture Edition, Development Edition, Database Edition, and Test Edition. In addition, discuss what's new for these editions for Visual Studio 2008.

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April 9, 2008
10:00 A.M. Pacific Time
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Since Visual Studio Team System 2008 has shipped, we are working on the next version of Team System code named "Rosario".  We created a little survey to better understand what the current Architecture Edition customers are using, or are not using, in the product. 

So if you own Visual Studio Team System Architecture Edition or Team Suite please take a few minutes and help us by filling out this survey. If you are a Team Systems customer and decided not to purchase the Architecture Edition, we would love to hear for you also.

Click Here to take survey

http://markgroves.us

Suhail, has just posted over on the Team Architect Blog the new release of the Class Library Power Tool.  It Requires VS 2008 Beta 2, please try it out and give us feedback.

More details

Join members of the Visual Studio Team System product group to discuss features available in Visual Studio Team Foundation Server, Team Editions for Architects, Developers, Database Pros, and Testers. In addition, discuss what's new in the upcoming Orcas CTP.

We will be holding two sessions:

Join the chat on Tuesday, July 3^rd , 2007 from 10:00am - 11:00am Pacific Time. Add to Calendar | Additional Time Zones

                -and-

Suhail just posted, on the VS Team Architect blog, details of a power tool that the team has been working on, the ability to define class libraries on the design surface, please check it out and give feedback: 

Currently planned scenarios:

· View Class Library projects on the AD (Note: projects = Visual Studio Class Library projects)

· View references to Class Library projects as connections on the AD

· Create Class Library projects from the AD

· Create references to Class Library projects from the AD

· Synchronize properties between Class Library projects and their representative applications on the AD

o (Notice the properties in the grid e.g. Class Namespace, Language, Assembly Name etc.)

· Create and use Class Library applications and references on the System Designer (SD)

· Navigate to the class diagram for a Class Library application.

Source: VS Team Architect Blog : Team Architect Power Tools

Join members of the Visual Studio Team System product group to discuss features available in Visual Studio Team Foundation Server, Team Editions for Architects, Developers, Database Pros, and Testers. In addition, discuss what's new in the in the Visual Studio code name “Orcas” Beta 1 releases for Team Suite and Team Foundation Server.

Join the chat on Friday, April 27th, 2007 from 10:00am - 11:00am Pacific Time.

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UPDATE:

We have added an additional session later in the day Redmond time to for the Asia and the Pacific (Australia, New Zealand, etc) customers:

Join the chat on Friday, April 27th, 2007 from 4:00pm - 5:00pm Pacific Time.

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As Soma announced yesterday the first beta is available for Visual Studio Team Edition for Software Architects "Orcas".  Over the next couple of weeks we go much deeper into several of the features we added to Team Architect for Orcas.  You can download Orcas Beta 1 here, there are also VPC images available to give it a try. 

Summary of new Experiences/Features:

Top-down System Design

Top-down system design allows users to reason about the design of a business solution without having to be confronted with technology decisions. The tool user is able to progressively refine a high-level system design, designing new sub-systems and applications in the context of the system in which they are to be used. With a top-down design approach, the user can describe the structure and connectivity of the overall design using un-typed systems initially, deferring technology decisions until later. When appropriate, the user can implement the design using specific technologies by introducing specific application and endpoint types.

This feature promotes the System Diagram to the forefront of the architectural design process within Visual Studio Team System

Conform to WSDL

Conform to WSDL addresses the problems related to contract changes during the development lifecycle, by providing an automated means to update an existing Web service implementation so that that its skeleton (methods, method signatures and message classes) conforms to a specified WSDL contract. The developer is then required to make the associated changes to the business logic (and possibly the implementation logic), which generally cannot be known from the contract definition. This feature facilitates developers adopting a contract-driven approach to Web service development.

Web Application Projects

This feature will provide users of Team Architect the ability to generate and round-trip web application projects (WAP) through the same gestures that they would use to generate and round-trip web sites in the Visual Studio 2005 series of product. The UI (shape semantics on the diagram, properties, etc.) will be exactly the same. The only difference will be that the output is a web project with slightly different generated artifacts – a VS project file with "code behind" web pages/services.

Architectural Roles

The Architectural Roles feature enables an architect, while working on the high-level design of a system’s architecture using the System Designer, to introduce elements into the design that play a specific pre-defined architectural role(s) within architectural patterns.  For example a user can create roles specific to aspects of their application architecture, such as Smart Client, Entity Service, Workflow Service, Service Agent, etc. 

Join members of the Visual Studio Team System product group to discuss features available in Visual Studio Team Foundation Server, Team Editions for Architects, Developers, Database Pros, and Testers. In addition, discuss what's new in the latest Community Technology Preview (CTP).

Join the chat on Wednesday, February 7th, 2007 from 10:00am - 11:00am Pacific Time.

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Come and join members from the Visual Studio Team System product group to discuss features available in Visual Studio Architect, Developer, Database and Tester editions and Team Foundation Server, as well those in the new found in the new Visual Studio Orcas CTP and Visual Studio 2005 Team Edition for Database Professionals CTP 5. There will be experts on hand to answer your questions, so we hope to see you there!

Join the chat on Wednesday October 6th, 2006 10:00am - 11:00am Pacific time.

To add this to your calendar, click here.
To see your local time of when this chat is, click here.

Come and join members from the Visual Studio Team System product group to discuss features available in Visual Studio Architect, Developer and Tester editions and Team Foundation Server. There will be experts on hand to answer your questions, so we hope to see you there!

Join the chat on Wednesday September 6th, 2006 10:00am - 11:00am Pacific time.

To add this to your calendar, click here.

To see your local time of when this chat is, click here.

I wanted to congratulate the Patterns & Practices Team, for releasing the first version of the Web Service Software Factory yesterday. As Don mentions in his blog, they are already working a WCF version of the factory, so stay tuned.

Don Smith:                

Before I get ahead of myself, which comes pretty easy for me , here’s the link to learn more about and download the Service Factory.

   

Wow, I’ve been waiting 8 months to write this blog entry. After months of planning, arguing, development, sleep deprivation, testing, writing, and making sure all of that wasn’t in vain, the Service Factory has actually made it onto MSDN. Since this is MY blog, I feel like I can be more personal than the other announcements I’ve written recently. This release actually means quite a lot to me. Not only is it the first p&p deliverable I’ve been involved in from the VERY beginning, but I truly believe it will revolutionize the way organizations build services. I believe it can have this impact because the deliverable has see a huge amount of customer and community involvement and it has a very solid future. We’ve been building the next version, which will include WCF guidance, has been under development since we started this [ASMX] release. AND we already have a good idea what the v3 will look like.

   

If you’re building services today and don’t know what I’m talking about, I would STRONGLY encourage you to spend some time evaluating Service Factory. Not only will it give you confidence that you are building services the right way today, but you’ll have all of the guidance you need to ensure you’re on the right track to build or migrate to WCF services in the future. I’m tellin’ ya, this is bigtime!

   

I’m working on some hands-on labs right now that I hope to have done within a week. This will really help you get up to speed quickly. I’ll post another entry once I’ve posted them on the community workspace. For now the webcast and the arcast should be good enough to get you started. Let me know if you have any questions.

Hello, well this is my first post on my new MSDN blog. As you can tell from the title of my blog, my name is Mark Groves, and I am a Program Manager within the Visual Studio Team Edition for Software Architects (that's a mouthful) product group. I am not really new to blogging; I have a personal blog over on MSN Spaces since the end of 2004. I was trying to post both work and personal items on that site from some time (or not much of anything recently), but thought it would be a better idea to split the content. This means I need to get much better at posting in both locations.

As you may be able to tell from some of my previous posts regarding Team Architect, I have mostly been working on Analysis & Design tools. In my previous life, pre-Microsoft, I was a Lead Architect / Director of Development at an ISV Golden, CO, using tools to design software, so it has been interesting being on the other side of the fence for the last 9 months since joining Microsoft.

Well I hope to soon be able to start posting some details on what we are thinking Orcas is going to look like for Team Architect, but if you have any questions or suggestions, please I would love to hear them.

(Beta goodness: Posted from OneNote 2007 Beta 2 via Word 2007 Beta 2)