Inside Visual Studio 2005 Team System 156
An anonymous reader writes "ZDNet has posted a top 10 list of things you need to know about Visual Studio 2005 Team System. From the article: Everybody talks about collaborative development tools, and heaven knows you can't surf the major developers' for 10 minutes without getting hit by banners trumpeting the latest. We can't fault Microsoft for wanting a piece of that action; but we need more than just a collaborative environment."
Failed Miserably on Test-Driven Development (Score:5, Insightful)
Bulky? Loaded? (Score:3, Insightful)
Superfluous! (Score:5, Insightful)
All this rubbish cruft in Visual studio these days. It's from the people that broght you Visual SourceSafe-Studio integration. Windows only, MS centric, homogenous coding standards, catering to the lowest common denominator of programmer in an effort to make coding more quantifyable for management. Basically, it's all just tools for making windows developers even more lazy than they already are, and to make project managers think they're more in control of their projects because of all the shiny graphs, network tools and printed reports.
Expect coding standards to drop in line with their usage.
Problem with the "Sophisticated Tools" paradigm (Score:3, Insightful)
That being said...
I've seen a fair number of high-power tools offerred that do everything from soup to nuts, UML, Code generation, integrated testing, etc, etc, etc. It's been my sense that to fully leverage these tools you kind of have to buy in all the way, you can use their architect tools, but you need to put a fair amount of effort into learning the tool, and then you're not developing in C# or whatever, but in the tool. You're then also locked into the constraints imposed by the tool.
Every sophisticated tool I mess with these days seems like it has this issue, and I guess it's structural- you have a simple core surrounded by proprietary extensions that in theory offer a lot of power and in practice require a huge buy in of time to leverage the extensions. For example, most java application servers have all kinds of built-in goodies (e.g. Jboss) but whenever I've worked with them I've seen almost no use of the proprietary stuff. Same for web frameworks, most projects I've seen don't leverage the frameworks nearly as well as they could. This indicates to me that the learning curve is too high and that in practice it's not realistic to expect that people can master and fully utilize proprietary tools in addition to languages, patterns, and other necassary knowledge.
To be fair, I don't work in the Microsoft universe, and it may be a bit more realistic to expect tool buy-in in a world where there's one major tool vendor.
Re:"Inside Microsoft Visual Studio 2005 Team Syste (Score:1, Insightful)
Say what you will about the Team System feature (Score:3, Insightful)
I don't know why some people are complaining about this software, its the best MS has come out with yet. Intellisense in any version takes a big hit on performance, the bottom line is, would you build a house with a hammer or a shoe. I can't understand why anybody would develop software for a living with an underpowered system! Complaints about VS underperforming can easily be resoled by simply upgrading to an Athlon64 or Opteron system.
I've noticed only a few minor usability issues, but these are things that have plagued every release of a VS product, little gaffs which may be annoying, but are infrequent and do not interrupt productivity.
Overall, the environment is much more streamlined, even menu items seemed to be intuitively placed within easy reach for quick access. They finally implemented region support within C++ files, so you can micro manage large classes by separating chunks of related code into sections that can be hidden, and finally outlining preserves its state when you save and reload the file.
When it comes to intellisense, NO OTHER development tool comes close to the speed that VS does. Sure, your CPU usage might spike to 100% for the first few minutes after openning up a project, but a list of class methods and members always pops up instantly when you type a . or -> and text completion is fast. When I was playing around with XCode, I though that it didn't have ANY intellisense like functionality until one day I just happen to notice it took about 10 - 20 seconds for XCODE to show a list of object methods or offer a suggestion for word completion.
The Team collaboration is the buzz word of the day for MS. It is their major focus to get people to upgrade to VS2005. I honestly can't see us using it. Its a small office and we are a pretty tight development team. At most, the Community menu item that appears allows you to bitch to MS about software bugs and feature requests.
But why anybody wouldn't upgrade to 2005 is beyond me. VS2002 was clearly a beta and VS2003 was its patch, but VS2005 is altogether a markedly improved and mature product, finally integrating tight ANSI and ISO C++ standards along with at least recognizing insecure standard library calls and dramatically improved STL support with better debugging support of STL objects. Within the first week, we found numerous minor bugs that could cause the odd random crash in our software simply by compiling the software with VS2005. We also came across multithreading issues due to better optimization of the compiled code allowing for faster program execution that caused race conditions or deadlocks. Something VS2002 or VS6 wasn't making us aware of.
In any regards, if you develop Windows software for a living, not using VS is a detrement. Sure there may be other decent tools if you develop cross platform apps, but using a 3rd party development suite to develop Windows tools only shows your not serious about Windows software development. We are already looking at XAML and Windows Presentation Layer development because we can get the latest beta tools directly from the horses mouth, other development systems are only guessing what XAML will actually become and making a half assed attempt at offering a retail package before Vista is released.
Finally, MS integrated embedded device development in the IDE that allows you to emulate the device virtually, complete with a skin to look like a phone or PDA screen. They have had these tools in some external install, but integration in the IDE is key to getting more and better software written for mobile platforms. I may even get a PocketPC to start learning how to develop for the mobile platform.
Say what you will about MS, Windows, an their other software, but they actually know how to write a decent development platform.
Re:Oh, I get it (Score:5, Insightful)
The submission article is TERRIBLE in every way. Loaded with buzzwords and nonsensical meaningless drivel, it was made for the sole purpose of getting hits. I wish I could mod down a front page story.
View the presentation [microsoft.com] from the Launch 2005 event and you'll get much more useful information than the tripe submission.
As one aside (quoted from the linked article): "There are far, far too many nuts-and-bolts geniuses out there who can rewrite DaVinci's Codex in T-SQL, but who think two-dimensional client-server architecture is good enough for Internet apps. To build decent apps today, and Internet apps in particular, you need more than an idea, more than good tools, more than an application-level design; you need an application architecture, a high-level framework that carefully addresses your applications' intended functionality within the context of your hardware, network, and data-source infrastructure -- and, worse yet, too many IT managers who know the buzzwords but don't yet really understand this. "
I find this humorous, because many of the designs that have crashed and burned terribly are the over-designed, n-tier, architectural astronaut abortions that were pushed on an unsuspecting public. On flip side, many of the designs that have pervaded and succeeded at tremendous levels of scale could best be described as "some scripts that hit a database". Slashdot, for instance. Wikipedia...Digg...I could go on.
One Company (Score:3, Insightful)
Re:Oh, I get it (Score:3, Insightful)
Thanks for the lesson, professor. Ignoring the nonsensical caching comment, the point was indeed that applications start simple (scripts hitting a database), and organically scale out from there. The vast majority of real-world success stories evolved this way. They didn't start with a couple of managers and an architect sitting around a graph diagramming what they read in N-tier Weekly.
If someone said "Gee, I'm going to start a site called
Re:Scary Reading! (Score:3, Insightful)
Re:Superfluous! (Score:3, Insightful)
It must be nice working on a small team. Even then, since when was bug tracking, requirements tracking, or iteration task tracking superflous? Working on teams with dozens of people located in multiple locations around the world these features are almost critical.
Re:A challenge (Score:3, Insightful)
Google maps API.
Sure, it doesn't use
And let's not forget the Google Ad Words API. And others, like specialized search services.
Re:Scary Reading! (Score:3, Insightful)
I went there expecting to learn about how to code for new vista features, how to take advantage of the new system features, integration for cross-platform development, new tools for helping design, anything! But this was all web apps, all day long. I don't know what shocked me more, the fact that there was no code written that whole session (none by hand) or that the room was half full of nodding heads. Since when did Dev Studio, with the most harmoniously combined debugger and compiler out there, become Frontpage?
I got a free copy of Dev Studio there and it requires SQL server (also free). But it sits on my desk and I pause long and hard each time I think of unistalling my old version for this one.