CIOL: Can you share some of the tools developed by Microsoft aimed at the software developers to improve efficiency and quality?

MU: Microsoft offers a host of tools for its partner community including VS08, .NET 3.5, Internet Explorer 8, Silverlight 2.0 and Expression 2.0 especially aimed to suit the needs of the developer community.

Microsoft primarily offers tools for an integrated application life cycle management space (ALM) providing processes and guidance for all to improve their skills and productivity.

Microsoft also announced the RTM of the .NET Framework 3.5 Service Pack 1 (SP1) and Visual Studio 2008 SP1 recently.

CIOL: How is the Visual Studio 2008 different from Visual Studio 2005?

MU: With Visual Studio 2008, organizations find it easier to capture and analyze information to make effective business decisions.

Visual Studio 2008 is packed with advanced development tools, debugging features, database functionality, and innovative features for quickly creating cutting-edge applications across a variety of platforms. Visual Studio 2008 also includes enhancements such as visual designers for faster development with the .NET Framework 3.5, substantial improvements to Web development tools and language enhancements that speed development with all types of data.

CIOL: How does Visual Studio 2008 add features for data-driven Web applications?

MU: Visual Studio is not only a leading suite of development tools for the industry; it is also an open and extensible platform. Visual Studio supports a rich, diverse ecosystem of developers who ship thousands of Visual Studio-integrated products.

Visual Studio Team System 2008 is an integrated ALM solution comprising of tools, processes, and guidance to help everyone on the team improve their skills and work more effectively together.

Visual Studio Team System enables members to collaborate and communicate more effectively with other team members and ensures software quality using advanced quality tools at every step of the application life cycle.

CIOL: What are the benefits gained from working with Visual Studio 2008?

MU: In addition, feedback from our partners suggest the VSTS/TFS has been beneficial for project management, work items tracking etc. Some of our Indian partners believe that the template-based estimation of the tool enables standardization and flexibility to apply different method without major manual work.

Our partners have experienced the use of some of the key features of VS08, which are use to leverage the productivity of the projects undertaken by them. 

The configuration management of VSTFS is utilized which helps the developers in tracking work items and it also enable efficient and seamless integration with all versions of the .NET framework and this increases the time efficiency of the developers thus increasing their productivity.

VSTFS enables quick integration and this helps to increase the developer productivity greatly as the debugging process is reduced and the developer gets to spend less time in fixing the bugs towards the completion of his project.