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Somasegar's WebLog

Reminiscing 2008...December 26 2008

With the year almost coming to an end, I was looking back at some of the remarkable events this past year.  One of the fondest memories I have of this year, although with mixed feelings,is Bill Gate’s keynote and luncheon at TechEd. This keynote marked Bill’s last public speech before he made the switch to focus more on his foundation.  I found it to be a very appropriate venue for him to finish on as he took a step back from the day to day Microsoft business.  He spoke to the audience that Microsoft was first created for – Developers.  As I have blogged about in the past, the luncheon that he hosted with a few community leaders that day was also very powerful in its messaging about the potential impact of technology and individuals partnering together to make an impact in advance of natural or other disasters.  

 

The mixed feelings come from the fact that I feel like I was a part of history here, but I am also saddened to witness a close to a great era. I am, of course, honored to continue the legacy of commitment to innovate and support the great work of the developer community and agree with Bill’s message that it is an exciting time to be a developer and there are many great things that lay ahead.

 

Code Focused Development in VS 2010December 19 2008

In a blog post in November, I mentioned a feature called “Quick Search” - one of the code focused features of Visual Studio 2010.  We have been lagging behind some in this area in the past and we wanted to focus on this as a key pillar for Visual Studio 2010.  Today, I’d like to share some more details of our code focused development investments and features.   

Highlight References

Highlight References is a simple but easy way to quickly understand a scoped piece of code and navigate to references.  The feature is activated automatically after a short delay - all references to the symbol under the cursor are highlighted.  Navigating to the next reference is easily done by pressing Ctrl + Shift + UpArrow (or DownArrow for the reverse direction.)  In the example below, you can see this feature in action; you may also notice that it infers which overloads bind to the current selection rather than a pure text match.

Quick Search

Quick Search was the code focused feature

Lab Management in VSTS 2010December 12 2008

One of the components of Visual Studio Team System 2010 is Lab Management. We first talked about this at the most recent PDC and we have seen quite a bit of excitement from our customers on this.

It is obvious that developers and testers are faced with ever-increasing complexity in the applications they build and test. This is true both for what we do at Microsoft and for everybody else out in the world doing software development.

As part of building VSTS 2010, we wanted to build the right tools that enable you to build the highest quality application.  The gap we found and addressed, was the speed and scale of the Develop – Build – Deploy – Test cycle and its use of technology like virtualization.  Our investment in Lab Management was specifically to address this gap.  

Developers are frustrated with too much bug “ping/pong” with their test counterparts and have a lack of access to distributed environments.  Testers don’t get the right tools and right attention and after spending 30-50% of their test cycle time on test setup most of their bugs get resolved with a “not reproducible” resolution.

To address those challenges we set out some basic principles – a) environment set up should take minutes and not weeks, b) walls between developers and testers need to come down, c) build automation extends to environment p

C++ enhancements in VS 2010November 21 2008

As part of my series of blog posts talking about VS 2010 and .NET FX 4, I want to focus on the work we are doing for the native developer as part of Visual C++.

 

In an earlier post, I mentioned how the Visual C++ team is investing heavily in enabling developers with large native applications to be successful on the Windows platform.  As a part of that, we released the Visual C++ 2008 Feature Pack earlier this year.  Visual Studio 2010 continues down this path by focusing on making native C++ developers more productive with significant enhancements to the overall IDE experience as well as improvements in the language and library space that further extend the power available to C++ developers.

 

Native C++ applications have been growing larger and more complex over the years.  VS2010 makes C++ developers more productive by scaling better when working with larger codebases.  One of the key areas where we are making significant improvements is IntelliSense.  The IntelliSense engine, which powers the majority of the IDE features, received a major architectural overhaul with a sha

.NET FX 4November 12 2008

As a part of the conversation on the VS2010 and .NET FX 4 pillars, I thought I would focus today on the .NET platform.

 

With .NET FX 4, we are focusing on empowering innovative user experiences in applications, allowing for re-invigorating large ISV applications, enabling developers to create connected and declarative applications, and enabling developers to build next generation line of business (LOB) applications. 

 

We know that user experience is becoming critical for LOB applications.  In WPF4, we are adding support for the Windows7 multi-touch, ribbon controls, and taskbar extensibility features.  The Surface 2.0 SDK will also be built on WPF 4 and share a common multi-touch infrastructure and programming model.  We are adding a Data Grid control that will significantly improve your experience when building data centric applications.  We are also addressing some of the fundamentals with even better deployment, continuing improvements in performance and scalability, visual improvements such as text clarity and layout pixel snapping, and improved localization and interoperability.