Visual Studio 2005 Team System offers a business process modeling structure, Homnick said.
In the past, developers would start with a model of a system, turn it over to developers and infrastructure professionals and that was really the only time all parts of the process synchronized, Homnick said. Afterward, different parties in the process diverged. Now, a modeling system ties phases together. "If you make a change in the code, it's referenced in the model," Homnick said.
While Team System gets Microsoft into the application lifecycle game, it is a 1.0 release that still needs complete integration end to end, said Huckaby. But he added, "I wouldn't focus on any negative as far as Visual Studio Team System is concerned. I'm completely positive on [Team System]."
ASP.Net, which is Microsoft's Web development platform in Visual Studio 2005, features improvements such as two-way data binding through declarative methods, Homnick said.
"The other thing I like [about ASP.Net] is they've incorporated at a much higher level things such as membership," meaning membership processes such as authenticating users to a Web site, Homnick said. Developers no longer have to write individual login scenarios, he said.
ASP.Net makes it easier to change the overall look of Web applications, Brust said. ASP.Net also features membership and personalization features to reduce code-writing, he said. But ASP.Net development and .Net development have branched away in a "fairly pronounced way" in Visual Studio 2005, Brust said.
Web development has to be treated differently than .Net development, he said. "Let's call it a paradigm nudge that can be a little disruptive."
Brust hailed the data-binding in Visual Studio.
"[Data-binding] makes it much easier to create data-driven applications, and most applications are data-driven, and there is a whole host of new features on the Web development side of Visual Studio," he said.
Data-binding improvements bind forms to specific columns in data, boosting data-oriented operations, he said.
Noting that some developers sought a third beta release of Visual Studio 2005 because of concerns about bugs, Huckaby said Microsoft has enabled early access to technology and has taken heat because of attendant bugs that would be expected in early versions. "I don't think that critique was warranted," he said.
Visual Studio Tools 2005 for the Microsoft Office System also drew raves.
"You now have a design surface where Word and Excel is the actual design surface. So it's just like working with a Windows form for other types of smart devices," Homnick said. Developers can add Windows control to the Word surface, for example.
New Visual Studio 2005 Express products offer an alternative to the LAMP (Linux, Apache, MySQL, Perl/Python/PHP) stack, Brust said. "This really answers a lot of what the LAMP stack otherwise would have had an exclusive on" in that a free development tool, free Web server, and free database are provided, he said.
Also a beta user of BizTalk Server 2006, Huckaby said that product "gets us closer to doing orchestration and messaging systems efficiently and easily."
The new version features complete integration with Visual Studio, making it easier to build enterprise applications, Huckaby said.
Between the second beta and the final, RTM (release to manufacturing) version, Microsoft did make some changes to Visual Studio 2005. These were described as "minimal" by the company. Most applications developed on the second beta will run on the final version with minimal modifications, according to Microsoft.
For example, client application user settings will revert to default settings when upgrading from beta 2 to RTM. A fix was made to the location where user settings are stored, accounting for the change. While the application user settings are affected during the upgrade, the application itself still will run correctly, the company said.
Also, a string serialization for ASP.Net profile and .Net application settings has been changed from culture-variant to culture-invariant serialization.
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