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16.02.05

Basta! 2005 Visual Studio .NET 2005 Team System

At the end of my first day at Basta! 2005 Scott Guthrie gave an overview of Visual Studio .NET 2005 Team System. The session was divided into some slides showing Team System features and a live demo.

Team System extends Visual Studio by providing tools which span the whole software development lifecycle:

I will elaborate on the Modeling Tools. Team System provides a set of tools for modelling all aspects of a distributed software system, such as the design of the architecture and services to implement as well as the modelling of the existing hardware infrastructure the system shall be deployed to. All tools are integrated into VS.NET and use a uniform set of views, such as toolbox, modeling area, explorer, properties view, and messages.
Two designers are used by developers or architects for modeling the system architecture and the services to be implemented, the Application Connection Designer, and the Class Designer. Both tools include support for code generation and roundtrip-engineering, i.e. bidirectional code and model synchronization. The Application Connection Designer allows to model web services, service endpoints, clients (Windows Forms & Web Application), and databases. The Class Designer is used to model classes, properties, methods, and relationships between classes. In contrast to UML class diagrams the elements of the Class Designer resemble the visualized language elements as close as possible. The Logical Infrastructure Designer and the Deployment Designer support the (test) deployment of architecture models and services. They support the tasks of operators. The Deployment Designer allows to virtually deploying a model defined in the Application Designer. The tools are promesing. However they lack important features in the current release. The designers generate code according to Microsoft’s still propagated Code First web service development. There is no way to influence code generation which is bad reagrdless of Code or Contract First development. According to Christian Weyer this won’t change until version 2, i.e. they won’t be included in the final VS.NET 2005 Team System release.

I really enjoyed the first day of the Basta!. The sessions I attended were pretty cool and I was impressed by the new features of VS.NET. However I still have some second thoughts about all the visual editors, especially in the field of ASP.NET development. It’s quite simple to impress an audience with the powerful point & click features, but developing a hudge software system based on point & click programming scares me to death…

Posted by Hartmut Wilms at 16.02.05 08:25

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