At the VS 2010 Launch!

Right now, they’re playing a video with a bunch of MS principals (like Gu) and developers discussing the history of Visual Studio (Microsoft 101: Visual Studio).  It’s online at channel9.msdn.com.  There are like 20 cameras for broadcasting the keynote globally.

The best swag so far—a deck of VS 2010 Poker Planning cards.   Coolest VS 2010 feature might be the built-in multiple monitor support.

Bob Muglia takes the stage, and says it’s all about developers.  Bellagio has HD projectors for the six screens, we can see way to much detail on his face.  HDTV = TMI.  The official slide just popped up—VS2010 is officially launched.  Now production ready, available for purchase and via MSDN.  50 partners have components and add-ons ready right now.  “A connected ecosystem”, “it takes a village”, ugh.

What can we do with VS2010?

“Stay in the zone” – Sam Gazitt

Multiple monitor support—we can snap a document out of the IDE and put it on another monitor, so no switching back and forth or having multiple instances open.

Box selection—can update multiple lines of code at the same time (a lot like Notepad++ if you’ve used that)

Built in support for JQuery, with Intellisense.  HTML code is standards compliant.  First time MS has shipped an open source tool with any of its products,  Also works with other JavaScript libraries.  Lightbox photo gallery in three lines of HTML code, only typing like 15 characters thanks to Intellisense.

“Get current” —

x86 servers are the most popular servers in use, and Windows is the most popular platform on the x86 servers.  Over 1 billion Windows clients in the world today.  Windows 7 is the most popular release ever in both consumer and business markets.  PC Sales “skyrockted” after Win 7 was released (no duh, Vista wasn’t good).

SQL Server 2008 R2 uses DAX, sounds like copy and paste for DB schemas.

New animation API for Win 7.  New native Ribbon designer.  MFC Class Wizard is back.  Huh?  Nice—the demo threw an error!  Both machine!  Library support for Win 7’s multi-touch and gestures.

SharePoint is the “central dashboard” for many businesses.  Opportunity to build SP applications is “off the charts”.  Env not set up well in the past.  SP 2010 + VS 2010 changes all that.

SP2010 “first class tooling set” in VS 2010.  Deployment was a pain point, VS2010 automates much of that.

SP Visual Web Parts are new in 2010.  Silverlight is also a part of Visual Web Parts.  VWPs intended to be very similar to web forms.  SP can run locally on a Win7 dev box!  VS 2010 automates deployment, so much nicer!  With debugging right in VS!

Cloud Apps—Windows Azure

“The cloud will have a very significant impact on all of us”.  “The cloud enables a next-generation application model that allows us to build scale-out applications”.  The PC and the Internet were major transition points–points of inflection "(“tipping points” per Malcom Gladwell).

About 5 years ago, MSN stopped buying servers and started buying pre-configured racks, and now they buy containers with 2000 servers and petabytes of storage.  Working with OEMs to drive the cost of hardware down.  If parts aren’t compute, storage or memory, it’s superfluous. 

The highest cost of running data centers is people. The usual ratio is 1 operator: 30 servers, world class is 1 operator to 300 servers.  Now can have 1:3000.  Learning a lot from Bing, with 100s of thousands of servers.

The cloud is a new, 5th generation application model:

  1. mainframe
  2. client-server
  3. Internet
  4. SOA
  5. cloud

Designed for Model driven, elastically scaled applications.  Many apps will run in the cloud without taking advantage of any of the new features.  “Our job is to allow every company, every developer on the planet to easily build cloud applications.”

Orville McDonald – WinPhone 7

WinPhone 7 apps designed to be connected to Azure or Server.  VS2010 includes templates for Azure services and roles.  Data hosted in SQL Azure can be modeled locally.

Win Phone 7 SDK has side-by-side designer and XAML view.  Blend can be used to style WinPhone 7 apps, with the back-end built in VS 2010.  The WinPhone 7 emulator runs an instance of the WinPhone 7 OS locally, so it’s real development against the real device without having the device yet.

Bob Muglia just pulled a WinPhone 7 out of his pocket, and they’re showing the demo app on it via overhead.  Phone gone before I got a photo.  Later this year, the Windows Phone Marketplace will be updated to accept Win Phone 7 apps.

Sharing Code

Phenomenal opportunity for the development system to provide an environment for developers to work together and share code.  Many environments are heterogeneous, including Java/Eclipse, Linux/Unix and Mac.

Visual Studio Team Explorer Everywhere is announced.  Fully connected to VS 2010, a TFS environment, works with Eclipse, Java, Linux, etc.  Based on Teamprise product.

TFS can be used by devs to prepare status updates so they can spend time on development.  TFS can also be used for bug tracking.

ALM Features – Doug Seven

Dependency Graphs, UML right in VS 2010.  Microsoft Test Manager is a part of VS 2010.  Recordings can be automatically made during testing and attached to the bug report in TFS.  “Intellitrace” captures the actual code that was executed on the test machine, like a DVR or flight recorder (code built via reflection?).  Not looking at the code in front of us, but what was actually executed.  The test manager actually plays back the actual mouse clicks.

TFS includes burndown information, tracks project progress, and dashboards are integrated with SP.  Test plan reports, trend reports, bugs by priority reports, and more.

VS2010 hosts virtualized test environment, can deploy server instances in the test lab.

SKU Details:

VS2010 Professional, MSDN Essentials Subscription

MSDN Essentials Subscription: 1 year subscription to SQL Server 2008 R2 Datacenter, Windows Server 2008 R2 Enterprise, Windows 7 Ultimate

The Ultimate Offer is extended to the end of the month–VS2008 Pro w/ MSDN Premium steps up to VS2010 Premium.  VS 2008 Premium steps up to VS 2010 Ultimate.

That’s all folks!