Data Tools and Software Testing : Data Tools

VS 2008 SP1

nihitk — Thu, 21 Aug 2008 00:00:37 GMT

For the XML Tools team this is an especially big release since SP1 is the vehicle in which two of our big investments went out for the first time. Congratulations to the feature teams involved in getting these out to customers.

XML Schema Explorer which adds to the already rich set of XML Tools such as XML Editor and XSLT Debugger that we ship in VS.

ADO.Net Entity Designer which is a first class designer to help customers adopt and work with the new ADO.Net Entity Framework shipped in .Net FX 3.5 SP1 for the first time.

Both of these tools are incredibly cool (since they are WPF based) and provide a good sense of the direction all our tool offerings will be taking in future versions of VS. Please provide all your suggestions and comments through this MSDN Forum.

Visual Studio 2008 and XML Tools

nihitk — Tue, 18 Dec 2007 03:31:50 GMT

Sure - it's a little late in coming, but still feels good to say that Visual Studio 2008 has shipped! You can try the 90-day trial versions or the FREE Express Editions of Visual Studio 2008 right now and get started.

There are a ton of cool new features and improvements on the XML Editor and XSLT Debugging (not available in the Express Editions) fronts that can help you be more productive working with XML data.

A couple of my favorite features are the automatic XSD generation from XML files which allows you to have validation and intellisense on any XML file you are working with and the ability to set breakpoints in the input XML files that an XSLT is actually transforming.

A great way to get introduced to the XML / XSLT tools in VS 2008 is through this article by Stan Kitsis in this special issue of the CoDe Focus Magazine which is dedicated to Data Programmability technologies:

XML Tools in Visual Studio 2008

There is another interesting article in an earlier issue written by Chris Lovett (creator of the immensely popular free tool XML Notepad 2007) which provides a much more detailed view of how the XML Editor is evolving into a platform which other tools and designers can use to work with XML documents:

How XML Tools Use the Visual Studio SDK

You should also check out the set of data programmability technologies that will allow SQL Server 2008 to be a very rich experience for developers.

Changing Gears

nihitk — Sat, 03 Nov 2007 04:46:00 GMT

After a memorable ~5 years on the Commerce Server team, I recently changed gears and have joined the world of SQL Data Programmability.

There are a ton of cool things happening on this front and the area my immediate team will be working on currently is the XML Editor and XSLT Debugger (yes - there is an XSLT Debugger and it completely rocks!) tools in Visual Studio.

Looking forward to blogging more on this new (to me!) world of XML and Data Programmability Tools.