Hello Readers,
I was very obliged and happy to be given a chance to attend the Visual Studio Team Suite 2010 Pitfall at Hyatt Regency on the 7 of October. It was a good learning experience, though most part of the session was not actually meant for students, but yeah, it was a learning experience. I would love to share the details (how much ever, I could grasp) with you.
Well, the event went off with a thought, “Where do you want to go?” This perhaps had been Microsoft’s campaign few years back. The speaker had given a lot of stress on this, throughout the seminar. It was thought-provoking. It made me think too.
Well, all he wanted to do was to highlight how things have simplified, moving from traditional compilers and editors to IDE’s to, now, Team Suite’s and Team Foundation Server. It has indeed simplified the entire process of product development.
Evolution:
Separate Editors and Compilers had been the developer’s tools in 1970′s. With editing the code in one environment to moving to a different, for compiling and testing. This gave way to IDE’s in 1990′s.
The scenario, then, was, having IDE’s built over various Build Tools, Test Tool and Source Code management Tools. This simplified the work to a good extent, however, there wasn’t any sense of comfort when it came to developing collaboratively in a Team environment.
Probably, this paved way for the development of Team Suite and Team Foundation Server. Although there was a VSTS 2008, VSTS 2010 is believed to be a much scaled version of 2008 including many functionalities which 2008 didn’t have.
VSTS Internals:
VSTS, at the core, contains a Visual Studio Team Foundation Server, that serves as the single Repository for all tools that are used by the IDE.
To name a few, the tools included in the Foundation Server are:
1. Tools for Work Item Tracking
2. Project Management
3. Version Controlling
4. Build Automation
And above all this, is the very enhanced Reporting Services (I shall mention about it, later).
This is the Architecture Diagram (or the Stadium Diagram, as they call it, probably since it looks more like a stadium)

the Architecture Diagram
As shown in this diagram, VSTS includes several API’s for Architecture Designing, Development, Test and Test Essentials.
And apart from this, it has the usual support for Sharepoint Services, Office Applications etc. As one of the speaker had put it, VSTS was more like a SOA in a Box. Well, it does look like one. All the plugins (or whatever they can be called) are services.
One thing I loved about the discussion was the simplified Versioning tools. VSTS 2010 can also do UX/UI versioning.
The debugging of the projects have been simplified to a great extent. VSTS has something known as Historical Debugger. As one of the speaker said, “With Historical Debugger, While Application runs, it can collect any form of data; viz. registers, logs etc and can be monitored. It also gives suggestions regarding how/why/when did it fail”
One more exciting feature showcased was the Lab Management feature. Using this, we can create a pool of Virtual Machines. Each machine could be used to run different instances of different servers. All this can be used extensively for testing purposes. An example of this could be, Suppose I want to test my application and I want to utilize SQL Server, BizTalk and things like that, so Lab Management can help me create virtual machines of each of the server instances and I could test my project on the single Foundation Server itself.
Reporting:
This was something very catchy. The reporting tools have been improved a lot. The sample reporting that I was shown was something like this. It was a report for a product development that had spanned for some 3 odd months. The report was a graphical representation of the work progressed since inception. The demarcations were Active Work, Resolved Work and Ended Work. I wish I could show you the snapshot of it, but I am afraid I don’t have one now.
But anyways, the report was so simplified and self explanatory. It could be used quite effectively for tracking the progress of the product.
In that report, there was this sample bulge in the area covering “Resolved” and decline in the area spanned by “Ended”. So this makes sense that during that time period of the development, the development team had resolved most of the bugs while the Testing team was yet to authenticate or pass the changes. Well, It might not seem to be some Big-Deal when you read it here, but believe me, it would be a great tool in analyzing the progress of the product development.
Well Guys, this is all I can write, as of now, about VSTS 2010. I would do more research and use it and update you further.
Some of the details might sound amateur as of now, I’ll try to improvise the article over a period of time.
All in all, the event was a good learning curve. I enjoyed it, right from being asked by that cute receptionist about my business card (If any, but yeah I shared my IVY card) to ending the session with some awesome lunch.
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