Last week, I had a visit from two members of the Microsoft Visual Studio team, Dave Mendlen, Director of Developer Tools Marketing (at left), and Cameron Skinner, Product Unit Manager of Visual Studio Team System (tiny, at right). They were here to give me at least part of the news about Visual Studio 2010 and .Net Framework 4.0.
I won't belabor the news, since I'm sure that it is being covered by InfoWorld's ace dev tools reporter Paul Krill and by Microsoft Developer Division senior vice president S. Somasegar, and that the press release will be on Microsoft PressPass. Instead, I'll show you some screen shots and tell you what I think.
Most of what Dave and Cameron told me was about breaking down the barriers between roles in a Visual Studio-using team, for which they had the marketing-speak of "democratizing ALM." They were specific about the ways that they are helping developers work with architects and testers. Since all of the screen shots below come from Microsoft and not from a live hands-on session, I can't speak to how well any of the features currently work.
First up is a picture of exploring the architecture of a game (click on the screen shot to see it full size):
How many times have you needed to visualize the architecture of an application? How many times have you found that your diagrams were out of sync with your code? This will be very useful for architects and developers.
Next up, a UML sequence diagram generated from the code of a method:
