Thursday, August 28, 2008

Visual Studio® Team System Code Name "Rosario" April 2008 CTP

Visual Studio® Team System Code Name “Rosario” is the version of Team System that follows Visual Studio Team System 2008. This release provides the earliest public glimpse of the work in progress on the next generation of Team System.

Download here

Visual Studio Future Versions

Visual Studio Team System Code Name "Rosario" – Looking beyond Visual Studio Team System 2008, Visual Studio Team System code name “Rosario” is an integrated Application Life Cycle Management (ALM) solution comprising tools, processes, and guidance that will deliver key advances in business relevance and quality focus. It will help development organizations to collaborate and communicate more effectively with other team members and business stakeholders. The solution will provide advanced quality tools to help ensure software quality in every phase of the application lifecycle, and it will provide the entire organization improved visibility into project activities and priorities. For more information, see Visual Studio Team System Code Name "Rosario".

Monday, February 04, 2008

Enterprise Library 3.5 for Visual Studio 2008

Enterprise Library 3.5 for Visual Studio 2008

After releasing Enterprise Library 3.X last May, and starting the Enterprise Library Contrib project, the team is currently working on porting Enterprise Library to work with Visual Studio 2008. According to Grigori Melnik, this includes improving existing application blocks as well as guidance on how to use them. Melnik also mentions, that moving to Enterprise Library 3.5 does not include introducing new application blocks. No official date was provided, but we can expect the release to be available after February 2008, after Visual Studio 2008 is officially launched.
Together with this release we can also expect to find updated Hands On Labs that will also include labs for the Validation Application Block and Policy Injection Application Block that were introduced in Enterprise Library 3.0.

Friday, January 11, 2008

Visual Studio 2008 Features

What's New in Visual Studio 2008

Even though I just said that Visual Studio 2008 doesn't look to be a revolutionary upgrade, that doesn't mean there aren't plenty of goodies to go around. Some of the notable improvements include:
  • LINQ support
  • .NET Framework 3.5 support
  • ASP.NET AJAX now built into the .NET Framework
  • Improved JavaScript Intellisense and debugging
  • Improved Web designer with better CSS support (based on Expression Web)
  • Nested Master Pages
  • ASP.NET ListView control
  • Multi-targeting - allows you to target different versions of the .NET Framework. Finally one dev environment for .NET 2.0, 3.0, and 3.5!!!

Friday, January 04, 2008

Service-Oriented Architecture

A service-oriented architecture (SOA) is a collection of services which thus lead to automation logic. These services may or may not communicate with each other to accomplish the application task...

When we say services, it refers to a discretely defined set of contiguous and autonomous business or technical functionality. A service is much like a function that is well-defined, self-contained, and does not depend on the context or state of other services. In fact, they just provide/offer a service by it’s own.

The term service oriented approach is not new; it is there from the long olden age of COM /DCOM and still survives and finds its existence in the software architecture space. Recently Microsoft has used this approach to design and implement WCF (Windows Communication foundation formerly known as Indigo) in Microsoft .Net framework 3.0
In an SOA environment independent services can be accessed without knowledge of their underlying platform implementation or other internal details which helps us greatly in interconnection like scenarios.Normally in this scenario, there will be a service consumer or service agent sending a service request message to a service provider. The service provider returns a response message to the service agent. The request and subsequent response connections are defined in some way that is understandable to both the service consumer and service providerOne of the other features of this approach is that the client is not tightly coupled to these services, both the client and services are independent of each other, thus the client is free to interact with whatever services are required