VISUG event : VSTS 2010

Hello,

Yesterday (27/11/2008) I attended the VISUG presentation about Visual Studio team System 2010 ( previously known as Rosario) . Pieter Gheysens gave a focused presentation on some highlights based on the VSTS 2010 CTP (November 2008).
VSTS 2010 is the third incarnation of the Visual Studio team System product portfolio. Since the previous versions (VSTS 2005, VSTS 2008) it has improved on several levels most notably on Source control management, build management ,test management and architecture & design.

Testing

• A new feature called Team System Lab Management. It is intended to ease up the configuration of testing environments using virtualization technology. (Not included in the CTP though)
• A new standalone tool code-named “Camano” . This tool is intended to help you manage test plans; test configuration, functional test cases.
  A functional (manual) test execution assistant (not sure if this is part of Camano or something separate) that helps the tester to perform the tests. Pieter gave demo and showed the potential advantage of this tool. It namely can capture everything the tester was doing while executing the test. Not only the visible step through video capturing the screen but also the system information and the event happing in the application and optionally also the called methods and parameters. When a issue arising during testing the tester can link up with TFS and submit a bug item together with the captured execution data. The developer can use this information while investigating the issue (No more “it works fine on my machine” replies. A question from the audience quickly also showed that you should be careful whet you capture because every thing is stored inside TFS SQLserver databases. It was also not immediately how the test runner gathers all program execution information. Do we need to build a special instrumented version of the application when we give it to the functional tester?
• Beside Web UI testing that was already available in previous version, a new test template named “coded Ui test” is available. Like in web UI testing, you can record your actions on a Winforms or WPF application and convert it into code and run it from the VS integrated test environment
• There are also a some new test window s; The Impacted Tests view provides a list of tests that need to be run and which code changes are covered by each of the tests. The Code Changes view provides a list of code changes and which tests must be run in order to validate each of them. Of course the best practice is to run all test again when you change something but I guess this can be a time-saver in some cases.
  
  

Architecture

• For better understanding code the code (for example the code base you get on your plate you never seen before and where you need to add or fix something) the new Architecture Explorer enables you to create a visual representation of existing code assets to give better insight , to see how things fit and work together. This can help you also in Impact analysis for changes.
• There are several UML model templates available. The difference with the previous Class diagram for example (beside not being UML ) is the fact that it is not linked with code. An exception is the sequence diagram that you can reverse engineer from existing code. I don’t know if it is two way though. So the most models are merely a communication medium. Being integrated in VSTS saves you the use of Visio or enterprise architect.
• A example of architectural constraint enforcement was also given. The Architecture Layer Diagram enables validation of code against a visual representation of the architecture. For example the presentation layer may not talk to class from the data access layer, you must pass a service layer. With the diagram you can hook up the class to be part of certain layer.
• I still wonder how this all fits in the OSLO vision of model-driven development .
  
  

Source control and management

• The most visually appealing demo was the branch visualization. VSTS now can depict branch and merge operation in a viewer ( a picture tells a 1000 words sometimes)

There some other topics on project management and the integration of TFS with Office Excel and Microsoft project , gated check in, workflow and parallel build management , ….and the ones I forgot . It other words there was to little time. I think Pieter have could spend an entire day showing new features of VSTS 2010.

I guess download the CTP and start playing with it.

Also...a nice gesture from Microsoft , they made several books avaible for the attendees. You had to be quick to grab one. But anyway thank you Microsoft.

There are some interesting session coming up so feel free to check out the Visug web-site (Design principles, Entity Framework, WCF)

Thanks for reading.

Best regards,

Alexander