During the first day of the Visual Studio 2005 Ascend training a basic overview was given of the Visual Studio Team System and .NET framework 2.0 features. The main purpose of this day was to create a mindset for all attendees to be prepared for the next three days.
Although the first day turned out to be pretty interesting, my main focus was on the three other days on which I planned to follow the “Tools and Integration” track, which covered Visual Studio Team System (VSTS) in more detail.
It is my intention to write some more detailed postings about a few of the Visual Studio Team System features in the next coming days. First, a short list of some of the topics (without any detail) that were covered during the “overview day” of the Ascend training:
VB.NET/C#
Although it has nothing to do with VSTS or Whidbey I cannot forget the following statement I heard during the training. It is definitely not my intention to start the VB.NET versus C# debate again (and hurt anybodies feelings) but I have to admit, I totally agree with his statement J
‘The only reason VB.NET is there, is to make C# shine!”
Visual Studio 2005 Team System
Core Tenets:
- Quality
- Productivity
- Connectivity
Software lifecycle silos:
- Infra architect
- Testers
- Project leader
- Business analyst
- Developer
- Etc.
VSTS solves the communication problems between the different silos.
VSTS brings you:
- Design for operations
- Increased reliability
- Predictability
- Quality easily and often
Main goal: see how you are doing DURING the project on quality, performance, time, etc.
ASP.NET 2.0
The ASP.NET team set a few goals for their 2.0 release:
- Development productivity; Current claim: reduce 2/3 of lines of code needed to solve common issues compared to ASP.NET 1.1
- Administrating and Management; provide easy manage and administrating functionality (instrumentation, performance counters, etc.)
- Totally extensible platform; make it possible to replace an extend all build in functionality (by using provider model)
- Make it the World fastest app server
Smart Client
Benefits the rich clients and thin clients world.
It is NOT a product, it is architecture!
Two main designs:
- Data centric
- Service centric
Data centric: it is al about replicating the data. For example, replicate the data when laptop is connected using SQL CE.
Service centric: it is al about “storing the actions” (instead of data alone). Store the xml messages on smart client and “play” them against the server when connected.
System.XML
Design goals for System.XML:
- Performance improvement
- Enhanced security; in v 1.0 no security support. Now code access security for System.XML
- Enhanced schema support; infoset available in v 2.0
- More XSLT processing; 4 times faster
System.Data
Programming model:
- Provider factories (to write provider independent code)
- Provider enum
DataSet Enhancements:
- Peformance and scalability improvements
- Standalone datatable instances
- XML datatype
- User defined datatype in DataSet
Binary serialization of content (in v 1.0 always serialized to XML)
Pretty interesting first day but…. will be back with more info on Visual Studio Team System!