VS/VSTS/TFS 2010 & .NET Framework 4.0 Announcements

Awesome… they just don’t stop improving…

Will be keeping a very close eye on these developments

Visual Studio 2010 and .NET Framework 4.0 Overview

Visual Studio Team System 2010 Overview

Channel 9 Videos

eWeek Coverage

CIO.com Coverage

I think the most important things they need to get right with the 2010 releases will be their pricing model and simplicity of TFS installation configuration. VSTS and TFS are currently quite expensive and relatively complex to get up and running… so you still hear of quite of a lot of developers being stuck with basic version control tools like Visual Source-Safe and Subversion etc…. this really needs to change if Microsoft wants TFS to get ingrained into development houses in a bigger way…

Microsoft Hyper-V – Very Very Cool?

I got Windows Server 2008 64 Bit installed today and downloaded the RTM for Hyper-V and installed that too.

Is just lovely. So clean, so easy to configure compared to its predecessors Virtual PC and Virtual Server…

Do I think this is the virtualisation technology to invest in for the future… OH YES!

Quick Comparison…

VMWare… the current market leader… more powerful than average company needs… cross-platform… expensive… technical support skills expensive and hard to come by… pretty big brand name with good vendor support platform… large user base… very popular…

Microsoft Hyper-V… the future market leader… powerful enough for average company needs… only works on Windows… free with Windows Server 2008 (although you still have to pay for the host operating system)… Windows Server management skills cheap and easy to come by… huge brand name with excellent vendor support platform… gigantic Windows management user base.

Reckon at this stage in the game Hyper-V still more oriented toward development and testing groups whereas VMWare is still the serious players’ production use choice… no real argument there… will I still be saying that in three years time… doubt it… I find myself reminded of comparing SQL Server 6.5 to Oracle 7 a lot of years ago… today Oracle is still huge but the vast majority of users get along just great with SQL Server…

From Visual Studio 2008 Team System to "Rosario"

This should be really good… albeit a bit too expensive for a lot of companies to invest in… have to admit… I’m still managing OK on a day to day basis using good old-fashioned Visual Source-Safe for small projects…but VSS really only gives you Source-Control.

For those of you of who haven’t come across Visual Studio Team System… it’s a bit like SharePoint for developers… on amphetamines! It includes lots of development management and process templates (plus associated workflows), for example around Agile and Scrum development etc… and is just smooth…

Whenever you have Visual Studio 2008 hooked up to Visual Studio Team system, you realise just how far ahead of the developer market Microsoft actually is… no other integrated development environment even comes close to this…

The next version of Visual Studio 2008 Team System is currently referred to with the Codename “Rosario”.

VS 2008 Team System is the back-end of VS 2008 and it offers features such as:

• Version control management
• Work-item tracking
• Build environment
• Reporting and Business Intelligence on project status, performance, and quality metrics
• Customisable process templates
• Integration with MS Office
• Team portal for team collaboration

For more information on product comparisons and new features within VS 2008 check out the product comparison @ http://msdn.com/en-us/vsts2008/products/cc149003.aspx

So what are the advancements that “Rosario” promises? The focus of the next release of VS 2008 TS is on business relevance, quality, and improved collaboration.

There is not enough room to go over all the new features that will be coming but some cool new key features, I am excited about in “Rosario”, are:

• Integration with Microsoft Project Server
• Project management across multiple projects
• Full trace-ability from requirements to tests
• Comprehensive metrics and dashboards
• Advancements in work item management  and communication and collaboration

You can download the latest CTP of “Rosario” here .

 

From Visual Studio 2008 Team System to “Rosario”

Woolworths Slashing Xbox 360 Prices?

 Gizmodo UK is today reporting that…

“You just can’t get the staff these days. Or, in our case, these are the kind of retail staff we love. It seems Woolworth’s is about to mirror the generous US price cuts Microsoft made on the Xbox 360 in the UK, thanks to an employee scan of its upcoming retail catalogue. Either Woolies is going out on a retail limb here or they’ve been given the royal nod by Microsoft that price cuts are imminent. According to the scanned page Arcade will sell for £129.99, the Premium or Core for £169.99 and the Xbox 360 Elite for £229.99. Right now, that compares with £159.99, £199.99 and £259.99, respectively. That makes the Arcade and Premium Xbox 360s cheaper than the Wii.In other words, if you want to save £30 on each of them, just hang tight for another few weeks. Considering that the US price cuts resulted in Xbox 360 sales jumping by 100% with many retailers, Microsoft might just be thinking it can do the same here. Let’s hope so.-Martin Lynch [Engadget] Microsoft XBox consoles.”

Windows 7 coming June 3rd, 2009?

Engadget are reporting that:

Filed under: Desktops, Laptops

As you may recall, Bill Gates himself mentioned a little ways back that Windows 7 could possibly be arriving as soon as next year, which prompted some quick backtracking on Microsoft’s part, but that earlier-than-expected date has now cropped up yet again, this time supposedly in Microsoft’s internal calendar. According to InternetNews.com, that calendar pegs the planned release date as June 3rd, 2009, which is a good deal sooner than the “early 2010″ date we’ve been hearing all along, and quite a significant cut into Vista’s planned three-year lifespan. What’s more, the site also says that Microsoft will take advantage of its Professional Developer’s Conference on October 27th to launch the first public beta of Windows 7, although that doesn’t quite match up with earlier word that it’d only be revealing some “in-depth technical information” about the OS.
[Via The Earth Times]

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Windows 7 coming June 3rd, 2009?

Aaaargh… The Hidden Cost of Google Chrome

Yesterday, I did an initial review of Google’s new web browser “Chrome”… (which by the way I’m using right now to write this blog entry)

OK, so this is an early Beta of the product… so it’s not perfect… and it does have a few features I like (especially rendering speed which is out of this world!)

One of my initial gripes about Google releasing yet another browser is the fact that it increases the amount of addition cross-browser testing web developers and designers will have to do… in an already flooded browser market… this is not a welcome addition and the hidden cost to business will be unbelievable.

So, anyway, this evening my initial fears have been proved well-founded… I have been developing a web application since July in my spare time which is reasonably advanced, but uses mainstream web development technologies including: Microsoft SQL Server 2005/2008, ASP.NET, C#, well-formed XHTML, CSS, and the latest version of ASP.NET AJAX Control Toolkit. Is all reasonably close to good development standards – although there are a few areas of improvement I could make.

I have made heavy use of the AJAX Control Toolkit in this application… more use than I care to re-develop at this stage in the game… I am hoping to get a Beta of this application into deployment this side of Christmas…

I have been testing using Microsoft Internet Explorer and Mozilla Firefox… and all is working seamlessly and identically across both browsers.

So I loaded my web-app into Google Chrome this evening and wasn’t too impressed to find that some of my AJAX controls aren’t working. Most of them were OK – but some aren’t fully working and I just find it dissappointing that I’m potentially going to have to start finding work arounds for this kind of thing if Google doesn’t kick their newbie browser into shape!

Google Chrome Web Browser – First Impressions

I got an e-mail in work first thing about Google’s new web browser…Google Chrome and my first thought was… “Why Why Why???” Why bother… We have Firefox, and we have Internet Explorer… and we have Safari all perfectly good, mature, major-usage web browsers that meet pretty much everybody’s needs already – and we haven’t even begun to mention the plethora (sheer plethora of other browsers out there) – least to say the browser market is already pretty crowded.

As a web developer who knows the difficulties of developing and supporting across multiple browsers with all their different features and nuances… I did not welcome this announcement at all – just another web browser to slow down development and create more expensive system support – thanks Google!

My second thought on this was… this is just Google being completely self-centred… this development is purely to give them much tighter control over the future direction of Google Gears… and from that angle… fair play to them!

Anyway… went to download this on my Suse Linux box… followed the link from Google’s home page and then got sent around in circles across infomation pages with no Download link…. why?… because Google Chrome Beta isn’t available for Linux… but their web site doesn’t tell you that! Logged onto one of my Windows Vista machines and have downloaded and installed there.

So first impressions…

• Speed – page rendering speed is unbelievable… leaves Microsoft Internet Explorer and even the new speedy Firefox 3 sitting on the starting lines… only comment here is that rendering engine is obviously different enough in places to necessitate substantial additional web developer testing. I logged into my Windows Live / Hotmail account and there were icons displayed on the wrong part of the screen and problems with javascript… all of which currently works OK in both IE and Firefox… not good!
• Very simple looking interface. Nice! The look and feel is, by and far, the cleanest looking browser I’ve ever seen. Looks really cool with Windows Vista transparency behind the tabs at the top… again…. just nice!
• Tabbed web pages… nothing particularly new there… although apparently behind the scenes this is much improved over Microsoft Internet Explorer and Firefix – especially around multi-threading and error handling… haven’t been able to test this yet.
• Dynamic Tabs – nothing blindingly innovative here… this is a clear rip-off of Safari functionality. It would seem that Google are taking a leaf out of Microsoft’s rule of thumb on copying cool features from other products instead of coming up with ideas of your own.
• Crash Control – idea being that if one application in one tab crashes, then the whole browser doesn’t mess up – all other applications in other tabs keep working OK. Wasn’t able to get anything to crash on an individual tab page so can’t really comment on this one at the minute. Sounds like a cool feature though. Did manage to get the whole browser to crash and shut down completely though… the address bar is really, really screwy!
• Incognito Mode – essentially private browsing – for times when you want to browse in “stealth mode”. Again a much touted feature of the up-and-coming Internet Explorer 8 this feature has been dubbed “porn mode” for the new generation of browsers.
• Safe Browsing – Google Chrome warns you if you’re about to visit a suspected unsafe web site. Nothing new or innovative there either – all features that are present in all major browsers.
• Instant Bookmarks – Where you just click on the star in the Firefox address bar to add a favourite… er I mean Google Chrome Address bar… I’d be very, very surprised if Firefox doesn’t sue over this blatant copyright infringement… again
• Google Apps – All work blindingly, blindingly fast – with each application opening in a separate tab.
• Google Gears Support – I tested this with my Google Apps -> Google Docs… works amazingly fast! Amazingly fast! Also was able to get my Application shortcuts added OK to desktop, start menu, quicklaunch bar etc no problems. Very, Very impressed.
• Extensions Support like those available for Firefox… seemingly non-existent – although I haven’t investigated fully.
• Comparison to Internet Explorer 8 Beta – think they are going to need to come up with something better. We are really starting to see the Google strategy come together for tight integration between the browser and web-based applications… Microsoft needs to get much much better on its Windows Live Services being integrated together and with their browser moving forward… it would seem that it’s really game on now moving forward with everything to play for – The OS, The Browser, The Applications are all up for grabs…
• Stability – not bad at all. Noticed a few glitchy little delays as I was typing into the address bar… but nothing I’m going to runaway screaming from.

Was a bit dissappointed with the lack of Linux support so far on this Beta… would have thought Google would have had that in there as a minimum in their ever escalating war against Microsoft.

If Google released a free operating system to go alongside and integrate really tightly with their free browser, and their free applications, and their free Android phone, then Microsoft would have a real problem on their hands.

All in all… still a beta… still a bit glitchy – I wouldn’t be rushing to put my credit card details through it just yet! Not hugely innovative in regards to new features that you can see with the naked eye end-user experience – they’ve really ripped off good features of other browsers which, when brought together like this, make it quite compelling. Is clearly oriented towards the usage of Google’s own applications.

The potential of this browser taking a huge chunk of browser market share from Microsoft… given Google’s notoriety, and extensive deployment channels…absolutely huge!