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Last week I attended a technical training in Milan concerning Visual Studio 2005 and Team System. Thanks to Chris Menegay and Marco Bellinasco I’ve got a lot of information about the upcoming products.
I would like to highlight some of the key features here:

Editions
Editions will be Express(people not willing to pay anything) , Standard (hobbyists), Professional(corporate developers), Team Developer (enterprise developers), Team Architect (enterprise architects) and Team Test (enterprise testers).

Development support
Visual Studio.NET 2005 might greatly improve code quality by enforcing code analysis, code coverage and unit testing during the build process. Server builds with rich reporting functionality are supported. New modelers alow it to model datacenters, applications and class structures and map them together. Moreover constraints can be enforced in order to avoid problems when deploying applications to operational environments. This is a common problem in enterprise level projects. The new build server allows to set up distributed continuous integration scenarios.

ASP.NET 2.0
Very powerful and feature rich framework for web development. Almost everything out of the box. Has a very open and extendable provider model. Lots of new features in the IDE. For instance refactoring, designers, generics, better debug support to name a few. Great team integration features. Modeling support. UML like visualisation and round trip engineering. Unfortunately no support for assembly/component level modeling. Ships with an internal web server for IIS independent web development. My favourite feature is Masterpages. But currently limited to a nesting level of two in Beta 1. Hopefully this will change in the realease version. Globalization and theming support allow it to develop very clean and well structured web sites quickly.

Team collaboration
Visual Studio Team Suite covers large parts of the project lifecycle, e.g. load-, unit, requirement-testing, project management, build management, continuous integration, etc. The supported standard process is MSF Agile but it can be altered in order to support different processes like for instance Rational Unified Process or custom processes. Offers interfaces for instance for Eclipse of JBuilder integration. The pricing will be very competitive, although it’s not official yet. It’s targeted at tools from Rational/IBM or Mercury. Team System has a lot of dependencies. It builds on SQLServer 2005 and Sharepoint services. But no additional licenses would be required. It seems that the Microsoft products are more and more dependent on each other. That makes it difficult to use only a single product. But as far as the licensing is easy this would be ok.

Testing and Profiling
Good support for automated web and webservice-testing. Testing of different browsers and bandwidths are supported. Profiling for Microsoft technologies is available. Distributed, data driven load testing is also supported. Lacks in the area of heterogeneous environments as there are no means to profile for instance Unix machines or J2EE servers. To be honest I didn’t really expect that.

At large the Visual Studio .NET 2005 Team Suite covers a lot features which were adressed only by third party vendors by now.

These are only some first impressions. Beta 2 will be available by end of march. This might be a good ime to start some real implementation.

The previous blog entry contains a broken link. Please use the one below:

Globalflyer Link

As the website is under heavy load it may take a while to open it.

For the Virgin Atlantic GlobalFlyer and its pilot Steve Fossett to set a world record for the first solo, non-stop, non-refuelled circumnavigation of the world they will have to follow a strict set of rules laid down by the governing body of aviation record attempts, the Federation Aeronautique Internationale.

In actual fact, as Guinness World Records pointed out to us, the fact that it’s a ‘first’ doesn’t in itself make it a record. Therefore, Steve will have to do the circumnavigation faster and higher than any others in order to take an official record. All in all, we think there are at least 3 and possibly up to 7 different records that could be broken with this single flight. We’ll let you know more about which ones when we’ve researched them all through!

The FAI’s rules state that a record attempt like this must start and finish at the same airfield and cross all meridians of the globe. What’s more the course must not be less than the very precise figure of 36,787.559 kilometres (around 23,000 miles) which is equal in length to the Tropic of Cancer. To allow the Virgin Atlantic GlobalFlyer to catch the vital jet stream winds, the FAI rules don’t oblige that record attempts follow the imaginary line of the Tropic itself but simply that the distance flown exceeds it.

That doesn’t mean, however, that Steve Fossett could fly across the Poles. The course must also be kept away from the North and South “Frigid Zones”, defined as being at latitudes of over 66degrees33minutes.

With the Virgin Atlantic GlobalFlyer capable of speeds of over 250 knots (285mph) the flight should be completed inside 80 hours. The route will begin from an airfield in mid-Western United States and will then follow the jet stream winds across the Atlantic to the UK. From there Steve will head south-east across the Mediterranean and the Gulf before turning east towards Pakistan, India, China and Japan. The final leg of the journey will take the plane out over the Pacific towards Hawaii before crossing the west coast of the US and returning to its launch site.

In the course of the epic journey Steve should fly over or near the following major cities: Montreal, London, Paris, Rome, Cairo, Bahrain, Karachi, Calcutta, Shanghai, Tokyo, Honolulu and Los Angeles. He will also cross major flight routes, meaning that keen-eyed passengers on commercial airliners may be able to spot the Virgin Atlantic GlobalFlyer as it flies several miles above them at around 45,000 feet

One of my customers was nominated for the Visual Studio 2005 (Whidbey) Ascend program. Even better they asked me to support them. The task is to migrate a JSP/Tomcat application to ASP.NET 2.0 using a lot of the new features.
Part of the ascend program is a special VS.NET 2005 training to prepare the participants for the work with the new tools.
As I missed the one in my area I’m going to attend in Milan/Italy in March.
By now I’ve already been working with the VS.NET 2005 Beta. I think the new features are great.
VS.NET 2005 will certainly be one of the the most productive development tools on the market.
A lot of code, e.g. for login or user management, written again and again for every application will be part of the ASP.NET framework. The framework is very extensible and open. Therefore it’s possible to embed this technology within existing applications.

I like J2EE technology very much, especially on the server side. But the client side rich clients and web applications seem to be the domain of Microsoft technology. In my opinion often the ideal technology mixture would be J2EE (EJB, JMS, etc.) on the server and .NET (Winforms, ASP.NET and of course Office) on the client. But only a few companies realize that as they prefer either J2EE or .NET. A lot of people are somewhat biased in terms of the “other” technology.

Be that as it may. I look foward to telling you in the future about my migration experiences and of course the pitfalls that every technology comprises.

If you need to be interoperable with your Web Services you have to follow a lowest common denominator approach.

Currently I experienced an example as I tried to call a Java Web Service from VBA through a COM Wrapper and .NET (VBA->COM->.NET->SOAP->Java).
I used an long type (64 bit) in the Java Web Service interface. When I included the COM Type Library in Winword I recognized a non supported Variant type for this parameter.
Unfortunately a long in VBA is 32 bit. The Web Service died on the last mile to the client.