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Visual Studio Ultimate Roadmap

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Today at DevConnections I shared some insight into the roadmap ahead for our Visual Studio Ultimate product. Visual Studio Ultimate is our complete, state-of-the art toolset. It provides tools for all members of the team, from product owners to testers, and is ideal for the development of mission critical enterprise applications. It contains unique features like architecture modeling, code discovery, Quality of Service testing, and advanced cross-environment diagnostic tools, which help save the team time throughout the software development lifecycle. Beyond the product features, Visual Studio Ultimate subscribers also enjoy additional MSDN subscriber benefits year-round, including feature packs.

As developers, we want to provide solutions to customer problems and we’d like to deliver those improvements faster than before while ensuring high quality. In my past few blog posts, I’ve talked about new features in Visual Studio 11 which help you optimize for that faster development cycle including support for DevOps. We want to deliver that same level of continuous improvement for Visual Studio user’s as well. Today I shared news that after the Visual Studio 11 release, we will ship Visual Studio 11 Ultimate Feature Packs as an ongoing benefit. The goal of these feature packs is to further build on the value and scenarios that we’re delivering in Visual Studio 11. The main themes for the first feature pack will be SharePoint Quality of Service Testing scenarios, and the ability to debug code anywhere its run using our IntelliTrace technology. These are two challenges we see at the interface between development and operations teams, which we can help address with the right tools.

In Visual Studio 11, we’re removing friction between the development teams building software and the operations groups managing software in production. Enhanced IntelliTrace capabilities and features like TFS connector for System Center Operations Manager allow teams to monitor and debug their apps anywhere: in environments spanning development, test and even in production. In the first Ultimate Feature Pack after Visual Studio 11, we’ll continue building upon the IntelliTrace enhancements in Visual Studio 11. We’ll add new capabilities for customizing collection of trace data, including the ability to refine the scope of an IntelliTrace collection to a specific class, a specific ASP.NET page, or a specific function. This fine grained control will enable more targeted investigations and allow you to debug issues more quickly, saving hours of effort. We’ll also invest in results filtering making it faster to find the data you need as well as improved summary pages for quickly identifying core issues.

In Visual Studio 11 we are expanding our support for teams working with SharePoint with features like performance profiling, unit testing, and IntelliTrace support. In the first Ultimate Feature Pack after Visual Studio 11 we’ll make it easy to test your site for high volume by introducing SharePoint load testing. We will also make it easier to do SharePoint unit testing by providing Behaviors support for SharePoint API’s. This is a great win for teams developing SharePoint solutions.

I’m happy to share this future roadmap with you today, and excited about the benefits we’ll be offering to our Ultimate subscribers in this first feature pack and beyond. These announcements are a sneak peek at the road ahead, and we will keep you updated as these plans materialize in the future.

Also make sure to visit Brian Harry’s blog to learn more about another announcement we made today, regarding build in the cloud for the Team Foundation Service Preview.

Enjoy!

 

Follow me at twitter.com/jlzander .

Comments

  • Anonymous
    April 03, 2012
    Any news about UI improvements since the beta?  Please, the toolbars/tool windows need fixing and nobody has said anything - some great features are in this version but it's so hard to ignore that the UI outside the editor is completely broken.

  • Anonymous
    April 03, 2012
    Just to be clear I mean the lack of colour in the icons and lack of ability to identify the unpinned tool windows from each other, the lack of contrast in the solution explorer.

  • Anonymous
    April 15, 2012
    It amazes me that there's been no simple little statement like this: "Guys, we're still aware of the comments regarding UI/icons colors/theme, but we're awaiting the survey feedback before letting you know the next step."  A small piece of communication that would go a LONG way.