It was a year that saw the resurgence of old tools and the redesign of new ones. Static code analysis, which was abandoned
long ago, became the latest craze in 2005 following concerns about security, code quality, and code ownership. Today, impressive
offerings in all three areas are available; 18 months ago, the vendors themselves barely existed. Likely, these products will
coalesce and one or two packages will emerge that can perform all three forms of code analysis.
Despite only a minor update in 2005, the much-heralded, oft-awarded Eclipse project enjoyed a breakout year, attracting partners
and inducing them to forgo their IDEs in favor of Eclipse plug-ins. The hold-outs -- notably, Apple Computer, Microsoft, Oracle,
and Sun Microsystems -- showed how much can be accomplished when companies follow their own vision rather than play along
as part of a consortium. Oracle did a yeoman's job revving JDeveloper 10.1.3 into one of the best free Java IDEs. And we found
plenty to get excited about in Apple's Xcode 2.2, especially its new cross-platform and object mapping capabilities.
But there is no question that Microsoft's Visual Studio 2005, once known as Whidbey, is the most important release among IDEs
in 2005. Technically, VS 2005 is masterfully done. Microsoft, however, earns credit not only for technology but also for the
way it designed the IDE and brought it to market.
Visual Studio 2005 is made from the best stuff: the imaginations, frustrations, and workflow work-arounds of Microsoft's own
developers. It dawned on Microsoft that its approach to internal development was counterproductive. Instead of mounting its
huge product line atop hundreds of reinvented wheels, Microsoft drove toward a unified, end-to-end toolset. If you want to
know what developers need, ask developers.
Microsoft extended Visual Studio's reach in all directions. Developers with tight budgets and limited requirements can get
Visual Studio Express Editions. At the high end of the Visual Studio 2005 product hierarchy is VSTS (Visual Studio Team System),
which provides developer collaboration, issue tracking, QA, automated builds, and robust source-code control -- all uncharted
territories for Microsoft, which has always left such critical things to third-party plug-ins. By wiring VSTS into Visual
Studio, Microsoft transformed its toolset into an instant and consistent enterprise development system of surprisingly little
complexity. While the Java IDEs have had many of these features for a while, Microsoft did a superb job of integrating them
and making them simple to use.
In 2006, we expect developer tools to focus more on threading issues as multicore processors become widely accepted on PCs
and notebooks. Visual Studio 2005 added the OpenMP portable threading library for just this purpose. We expect that the tools
needed to resolve the unique problems posed by threads will become much more prominent both in IDEs and as stand-alone solutions
and will lead the final rejection of the single-threaded program model.
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