I attended most of the sessions conducted under “Developer Tools” and one session in “Databases” and one session in BizTalk Server. These are the list of sessions I attended at Tech-Ed.
- Managing Software Life Cycle with VS 2005 Team System
- Understanding ASP.NET 2.0 Roles, Membership and profiles API
- Testing and Quality tools in VSTS
- Security Enhancements in Visual Studio 2005
- Localization and Globalization in .Net Framework 2.0
- Visual Studio 2005 Team Foundation internals
- Orchestrating Business Processes with BizTalk
- ADO.NET 2.0 Changes
- Introducing Avalon – Future of UI
- Introducing System Transactions
Out of all the sessions I liked (also got product knowledge) sessions on Visual Studio 2005 Team System, ASP.Net 2.0, Localization and Globalization in .Net 2.0 and Avalon – The future of UI.
I am much excited by knowing VS 2005 Team system software. I hope this will definitely change the process of developing software projects in an organization. According to Microsoft “Visual Studio 2005 is not just for Developers – It is for development”. Unlike other versions of Visual Studio, Microsoft Visual Studio Team System is aimed at more than just developers. Enterprise-level application development is much more complex and thus requires a much more robust tool. With designing, architecting, coding, and testing, along with the need for project management and team development, the standard development tool just doesn't cut it by itself. This is why many enterprises invest in additional tools such as IBM Rational's XDE or Compuware's DevPartner.
This tool is aimed at a number of areas. Architects, designers, developers, and testers will all be able to use this project, meaning this is not your standard Visual Studio. The tools needed by each of these roles are incorporated into the product and integrated with the tools used by the other roles. This integration helps to provide an enterprise with an integrated tool to build end-to-end solutions.
The core of VSTS includes features such as item tracking (more than just tasks), enterprise source control (something serious—not Source Safe), powerful reporting, and many robust tools.
Visual Studio 2005 also added some new features for us, I mean ASP.NET developers. The change I wondered most is the way it creates web applications and runs them on the machine. In ASP.NET 2.0 we don’t need IIS any more to run web applications. It looks strange to hear but it is.
In earlier versions of VS we need to create the web projects under our configured virtual root only (typically all the web applications resides under http://localhost/...) but in VS 2005 we can create our web application anywhere in our hard drive as like windows application. A small web server engine comes out of box with VS 2005. When we create, compile and run the web application from VS2005 IDE this engine dynamically creates the virtual directory on the folder we created and assigns some random port to access it. In this way it works. But this is only for development and unit testing purpose. We can develop web applications as we are familiar in VS2003 also with this.
There are new classes and namespaces introduced in VS2005 to enhance the development further. For ex: they introduced new classes like memberShip and memberShipService etc. with these classes we can cut short our development work to develop so called login, authorization and authentication tasks.
One more interesting topic in the Tech-Ed is Avalon. According to Microsoft this is the future of UI. We can do whatever we want for UI in Avalon. This is like a markup language and executes in client system. As of now this is tightly integrated with “LongHorn” the next generation windows operating system. Windows XP SP2 and Windows server 2003 also had support for Avalon but not as much as LongHorn. There is a language called XAML which is used to write code for Avalon.
Overall I can say that it helped me to know and understand the new features of Visual Studio 2005. I think this would help us to develop better software especially our SuiteVoyager better. The new and exciting technology called Avalon is pretty good and attractive. This Avalon is mostly for UI purpose and also we can program it as like C#.
The most important is using VS 2005 team systems we can follow a systematic process while project is under development. All the project items we can keep at one place so it makes the life of ours easy.
