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Follow UsBANGALORE, INDIA: Ensuring software quality using advanced software development product at every step of the application life cycle is aim of each and every software developer.
Adding skills gained from the experience to new tools is one bigger task for techies. Apart from the above, facilitate collaboration among all members of a software team including Project Managers architects, developers, testers, and quality teams, speeding development time and ensuring the predictability and reliability of the development process is another task for each developer.
To fulfill the need and demands of software developer community, Microsoft recently released the Microsoft Visual Studio and Visual Studio Team System.
In an interaction with CIOL, Moorthy Uppaluri, director DPE, Microsoft India talked about the Microsoft Visual Studio and Visual Studio Team System.
Uppaluri also discussed how the Visual Studio 2008 enables developers to build applications that target multiple versions of the .NET Framework. Excerpts:
CIOL: Can you throw light on the Visual Studio 2008 and Visual Studio Team System?
Moorthy Uppaluri: Visual Studio 2008 is a suite of development tools designed to aid software developers, whether they are novices or seasoned professionals to face complex challenges and create innovative solutions.
Visual Studio 2008 enables developers and development teams to rapidly create connected applications for Windows, mobile devices and the Web.
Visual Studio Team System 2008 (VSTS) is an integrated set of tools for architecture, design, development, database development and testing of applications. It allows the team members to continuously collaborate and utilize a complete set of tools and guidance at every step of the application life cycle
CIOL: What are suites of products offered under VSTS?
MU: VSTS has a suite of client and server products like:
Architecture Edition
Visual Studio Team System 2008 Architecture Edition focuses on improving the design and validation of distributed systems. It gives architects, operations managers, and developers the ability to visually construct service-oriented solutions and validate them against their operational environments prior to deployment.
Database Edition
Visual Studio Team System 2008 Database Edition provides advanced tools for database change management and testing and offers functionality to enable database developers and administrators to be more productive and increase application quality in the database tier.
Development Edition
Visual Studio Team System 2008 Development Edition provides developers with an advanced set of tools to identify inefficient, insecure, or poor-quality code; specify coding best practices; and automate software unit testing. These tools help team members write better-quality code, reduce security-related issues, and avoid bugs later in the development lifecycle.
Test Edition
Visual Studio Team System 2008 Test Edition provides a comprehensive suite of testing tools for Web applications and services that are integrated into the Visual Studio environment. These testing tools enable testers to author, execute, and manage tests and related work items
Microsoft Visual Studio Team System 2008 Team Foundation Server is the collaboration server at the hub of the system, which enables everyone on your team to work more effectively and deliver better quality software.
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.
CIOL: How can a developer debug a .NET framework library source code using Visual Studio 2008?
MU: In VS 2008, you have the capabilities to put a break point and debug through the .net framework libraries. This can be useful for many developers.
CIOL: How does Visual Studio 2008 enable developers to build applications that target multiple versions of the .NET framework?
MU: In VS 2008, you have the capabilities to target either the .NET 2.0, 3.0 or 3.5 frameworks. Hence, this gives a lot of flexibility to the developers to use a single development tool (VS 2008) to build applications targeting multiple .net framework versions.
The three primary benefits for developers working on Visual Studio 2008 are:
Rapid application development
Provides advanced development tools, debugging features, database functionality, and innovative features for quickly creating cutting-edge applications across a variety of platforms with the .NET framework 3.5. Provides developers with all the tools and framework support required to create compelling, expressive, AJAX-enabled Web applications; and the ability to target multiple versions of the .NET Framework from within the same development environment.
Effective team collaboration
Delivers expanded and improved offerings that help improve collaboration in development teams, including tools that help integrate database professionals and graphic designers into the development process.
Breakthrough user experiences
Offers developers new tools that speed creation of connected applications on the latest platforms including the Web, Windows Vista, Office 2007, SQL Server 2008, and Windows Server 2008.