Visual Studio Launch Event: Team System Blues, Lucky Charms and a video camera Jan 27, 2006 21:49
I went to the MS Launch event for Visual Studio 2005 and SQL Server 2005. I have to say, MS puts on a good event: decent presentations, a bag of goodies (free Visual Studio 2005 Standard), a roomful of vendors, and tons of people. Besides that, this event was free. I didn't eat their boxed lunch, so I won't comment on their catering, although they didn't look very appealing to me.
Regardless, I attended the developer tracks so I missed the SQL Server sessions. Some of the new .NET 2.0 features looked interesting. I was too tired to stay for the "Smart Client" session, but I did watch the ASP.NET presentation and had a chance to look at MS' new Team System.
The ASP.NET session was interesting, they've added some things like "master pages" which enable designers to build out the "O frame" of your website without disturbing the code monkeys. I don't particularly like the name, I probably would have called them "content templates" or something like that, but it's just a name.
Some other things they've added are: a login/membership framework and site navigation support. Pretty interesting, but in the context of a *framework* solution, it appears to be lacking. What I mean by that is that it appears to be an ASP.NET solution, not a .NET 2.0 solution. If you have "Smart Clients", they can't leverage the same login/authentication or permissions data. The "obvious" MS full-stack solution is to couple it with Active Directory, but that's another can of worms.
Ideally, what I'd like to see is a set of simple (serializable) .NET classes that contain permission information, and ASP.NET and WinForms components/classes able to interpret/interact with these guys. Perhaps that is what MS has done, since I haven't looked under the hood, but I'd be surprised if that were the case given what I saw in the ASP.NET presentation.
Team System...what to say? I think my colleague described MS Team System best when he said: "Do Less with More." AFAIK, the idea behind Team System is to incorporate all of the SDLC ("Software Development Life Cycle") processes into Visual Studio. When I say into Visual Studio, I mean everything is in Visual Studio. I've never seen so many explorers, message tabs, windows and other aspects of integration as I've seen with Team System stuff. It was overwhelming: window panes sliding left and right, modal dialogs poping up, text appearing in messages pane, new forms embedded in the code window, etc. all in Visual Studio. It's like freaking Prego: it's in there.
There seems to be a bunch of features packed into Team System, but no real coherent design. It's like MS had a long list of features and devoted a bunch of developers to hack it up and cobble it together. Fairly typical of a MS version 1 release.
Another thing that was interesting to me was that it looks like they put lipstick on the pig known as Visual Source Safe and made it part of the Team System Server. There are still .vss files that need to be checked in and Visual Source Safe's code merge dialog is still there (I actually think the VSS code merge dialog is alright). I really wish they would retire Source Safe. Although they have appeared to enhance it with code "shelving", which I admit, is a nice feature.
Team System supports Agile and CMMI SDLC methodologies. After picking a template for a specific methodology, one adds "work items" to their project. These work items are the center of what gets managed in Team System. They can be assigned to developers, be associated with checkins (and required), etc. Team System also has some additional features like code coverage and load/unit testing integration.
All this sounds good in theory, but the question that kept haunting me throughout was: why integrated? Perhaps I'm missing something really glaring, but why do these things need to be integrated into Visual Studio? I can understand integration to leverage some synergies like: source code and issue tracking. Things like Subversion and Trac have done.
What I don't understand is the obsession with Visual Studio integration. There are certainly some nice integration interfaces to exploit in SDLC, but why not decouple them from each other? Do users not want to run separate exe's anymore? I imagine the answer is the larger full-SDLC-stack sale to corporations that want to deal with a single vendor.
One thing that I noticed that made me laugh was during the ASP.NET presentation, which was actually after the Team System one. They were building this concert ticket pickup portal website. One of their testing/sample data records was a band named "Team System Blues". Apparently someone at Microsoft agrees with me. ;)
BTW, MS does indeed recommend the use of Borland's Caliber RM for requirements management and they even mentioned it and showed a little bit of it during the presentation. Borland should pick up a few Caliber RM sales due to the MS effect.
The last thing I saw was a presentation of BizTalk 2006. I've never seen BizTalk before, and the idea of a kind of message-based middleware server for business processes is an interesting one. It reminds me of the "universal adapter" for businesses that IBM poked fun of on their commercials. The visualization of the mappings upon mappings makes things very clear.
My overall impression of BizTalk is that it takes a top-down approach to the problem, when in my experience a bottom-up approach to this kind of stuff is better. What about writing some script code or leverage XSLT? Seems to me these things can be done fairly quickly, reliably and inexpensively. Maybe I'm missing something or haven't been exposed to problems BizTalk tries to address, but I just can't imagine when I'd use such a thing.
Regardless, the only reason I bring up BizTalk is that my colleague again made me crack up when he compared the visual diagramming symbols as can be seen here, to Lucky Charms. Blue diamonds, Green Clovers and Yellow Moons...exactly what we need, another set of thingies to learn/master. And for those who haven't taken the Lucky Charms Sex Quiz by Hollywood's renaissance man (actor, martial arts expert, corporate mogul, scientist, etc.) Trygve Lode, I suggest you do so.
I didn't stay for the full BizTalk session, I got the first of many EMC phone calls to let me know that I won a Sony digital video camera. What can I say? I'm a lucky guy with voice mail messages from EMC sales reps. ;)
Write a comment
- Required fields are marked with *.