VS Team Architect Blog : tsbt-arch

Skinner’s Blog: Back At the Blogging Game

mgroves — Wed, 18 Jun 2008 19:02:40 GMT

Our Product Unit Manager, Cameron Skinner is back at the blogging game, as you can tell from his post we are working on some exciting new features for Rosario.

http://blogs.msdn.com/camerons/archive/2008/06/13/new-role-running-the-vsts-architecture-edition-team.aspx

Importing & Exporting Custom Prototypes

mgroves — Fri, 24 Aug 2007 01:43:00 GMT

You may not be aware, but within Visual Studio Architecture Edition you can create customized versions of the applications, servers, endpoints, and zones that you find in the Distributed System Designers Toolbox. You can add these customized versions to the Toolbox as custom prototypes.

For more information about custom prototypes, see TN_1107 at http://msdn2.microsoft.com/en-us/teamsystem/aa718854.aspx.

In the VS 2005 version, there was no simple way to import or export the custom prototypes you create. To perform this task, you must open the Visual Studio directory, locate the prototype directory, and then figure out which prototype file corresponds to the Toolbox item that you want to import or export! We agree this is not a very elegant way of sharing files among a team.

In Architecture Edition 2008 we made it more convenient for you to import and export custom prototypes within Visual Studio. To import a custom prototype, right-click the Toolbox and click Import Prototype. Visual Studio will prompt you to select the prototype file that you want to import (see Figure 1). To export a custom prototype, right-click a Toolbox item and click Export Prototype. Visual Studio will prompt you to specify the location where you want to save the prototype.

Figure 1: The Import Dialog Box

You can also choose to import a custom prototype for all users or your use only (see Figure 1). This option helps filter the Toolbox for multiple users on a single computer. For example, if I want to add 100 new Toolbox items that only I will use, I can add them for my use only instead of adding them for all users on the computer!

Note: To add a prototype for all users requires administrator privileges. If you are running as a normal user in Windows Vista, you might want to save Toolbox items as for this user only.

Team Architect Power Tools

suhaild — Wed, 15 Aug 2007 23:26:00 GMT

We've just released the Team System Architecture Edition Power Tools.

The new download is available here

This release requires Orcas Beta 2.

Features in this release are :

Class Libraries on the AD/SD

View Class Library projects on the AD
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
Create and use Class Library applications and references on the System Designer (SD)

Please give us feedback. You can do so by posting your questions/feedback to our forums.

Conform to WSDL - New Feature in Team Architect Orcas

vinaybh — Wed, 20 Jun 2007 05:08:00 GMT

The first beta is available for Visual Studio Team Edition for Software Architects "Orcas". You can download Orcas Beta 1 here, there are also VPC images available to give it a try.

Team Architect released the summary of new experiences and features in this Visual Studio edition recently here. In this post we'll focus on Conform to WSDL feature.

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 webservice development.

This feature is available as a context menu as shown below on all webservice endpoints both in Application Designer and System Designer (including System Endpoints).

Upon invoking this menu and providing the new WSDL file to conform to, the following is accomplished in the code file (if endpoint is implemented) or the model (if unimplemented):

· Creating method signatures with WebMethod attribute declarations for new operations.

· Modifying signatures of existing web methods for updated operations.

· Deleting the WebMethod attribute where operations are not present.

· Adding/modifying appropriate WSDL attributes to methods and message classes.

· Declaring/recreating new message classes while moving old message classes to an obsolete namespace.

· Adding comments whenever changes are made.

Of particular note is that the algorithm *never* deletes user-written business-logic which may contain valuable intellectual property or represent the result of significant effort that the user may wish to use in some other context.

Here is an example that demonstrates the usefulness of this feature. Below is the code-behind file of an endpoint that represents a webservice named CalculatorService. It has two webmethods Add and Divide that take integer inputs.

Feedback

Please try this out give us feedback on if this feature addresses some or all of your requirements for contract driven webservice development.

New Path Editor for the Domain-Specific Language Tools (DSL Tools)

mgroves — Tue, 05 Jun 2007 20:03:00 GMT

In the DSL Tools, paths are used in a DSL definition to specify how to navigate from one object in the domain to another. They are used in various parts of the DSL definition, such as:

· Compartments: a path specifies which elements will be displayed in the compartment ;

· Decorator maps: a path can be used to specify the object that has the property to display in the decorator;

· ExplorerBehaviour: paths are used to specify which nodes to hide.

The path syntax is described on the DSL Forum at http://forums.microsoft.com/MSDN/ShowPost.aspx?PostID=464793&SiteID=1. Basically, a path is composed of multiple path segments. Each path segment specifies a transition from an object to a link, or from a link to an object.

However, the path syntax, although simple, is not particularly easy to work with and the current authoring experience is quite basic – as you type the path into a textbox, the individual segments of the path are checked and a tooltip is displayed if the path segment is invalid. The path as a whole is not checked until the validation rules are run against the model (e.g. by right-clicking on the design surface and selecting “Validate”), so it is possible to enter an invalid path in the textbox.

CTP 2 of the VS SDK for Orcas Beta 1 adds a richer path editing experience to the DSL Designer in the form of a drop-down tree control. You can now either type the path syntax as before, or you can drop down the control to display a tree of all of the valid paths from the current starting point.

This screen shot shows the path editor for a Task element in a language created using the Task Flow template:

The tree displays one or more root nodes, each root node representing a valid starting point for the path. In most cases, there will only be one valid starting point. For example, when specifying the model elements to display in a compartment, the starting point is always the DomainClass that the CompartmentShape containing the compartment is mapped to.

Each child node in the tree represents a domain class or link that can be transitioned to from the parent node, so you can build up a valid path simply by starting from the appropriate root node and navigating down through the child nodes until you reach the domain class or link you want to end at. Selecting the end-point node collapses the tree control, and the appropriate path syntax is shown in the text part of the control.

The tree control also enforces some other restrictions:

· A limitation of v1 of the DSL Tools means that a path may only contain one relationship that has a multiplicity of “many”. If you have selected a node that represents a “many” relationship, then there will be no more “many” nodes under that node.

· Paths of the form “A->B->A”, although valid, do not make sense in practice, so the nodes displayed by the tree won’t allow you to create paths like this. However, if you really want, you can still create “no-op” paths of the form A->B->C->B->A (!).

For performance reasons, validation rules are not run every time a path changes, so there are still some circumstances in which a path created with the editor may later fail validation (although these should be uncommon). Overall, however, the path authoring experience should be much simpler and quicker. Please try it out and let us know what you think!