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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.
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 Sinofskyand 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.