Durham and Atlanta Visual Studio Ultimate Events and related material

We had a standing-room-only crowd in Durham NC.  Brian Harry keynoted, and talked about the themes behind Visual Studio 2010. He covered testing, version control, branch visualization, Intellitrace, and some details about how we do software development.

I gave several sessions, covering some of the new productivity features in Visual Studio 2010, deep insight and debugging features, and overall improvements in the development experience. The ability to move back and forth with Intellitrace and correlate events with debugger traces was great.  If you’re interested in this, Hadib Heydarian has lots of good information about Intellitrace at blogs.msdn.com/habibh/archive/tags/IntelliTrace/default.aspx, including how to use it on a 64-bit machine (see blogs.msdn.com/habibh/archive/2009/10/12/how-to-edit-code-when-debugging-a-64-bit-application.aspx).

From there, we went into some of the new Agile Management features in TFS 2010, including workbooks for managing sprint and product backlogs.  That session generated a lot of excitement.  It’s so much easier to manage a team using the new work item tracking system, including breaking down user stories or product backlog items into the tasks or sprint backlog items necessary to achieve them.

I hope to have Brian’s keynote presentation materials to share in the future.  In the meantime, we used the same materials for the rest of the sessions as we did in Charlotte.

In Atlanta, Peter Provost gave both the Keynote and the session on Architecture. If everything falls into place, he might have some articles about model extensiblity in the next week or so.  Keep an eye on his blog at peterprovost.org/blog/. He didn’t just talk about model extensibility, but extensibility for all of Visual Studio.  Both are based on the same mechanism (MEF).  Adding in new features or functionality to Visual Studio is much easier than it was before.  In the case of our diagrams, you can extend them through a number of tools, interrogate and filter the model using LINQ, and add new functionality either for software modeling or domain modeling. It’s not just pretty pictures either—we’re UML 2.1.2 compliant. The diagrams are produced by the DSL toolkit, but there is a CMOF-based UML model in the Model project. Of course, if you want to, the DSL toolkit itself is revised—you can get it here.  You’ll need to install the Visual Studio 2010 SDK first, which is here.  There is sample code at code.msdn.microsoft.com/DslTools. Other good resources include: −http://blogs.msdn.com/camerons −www.lovettsoftware.com −blogs.msdn.com/stevecook −blogs.msdn.com/jmprieur And one of our regional consultants, Oleg Synch, has done some beautiful work, including a bunch of code generation, T4, and DSL samples. In addition, there is a lot of training content at - https://channel9.msdn.com/learn - blogs.msdn.com/profiler - microsoftpdc.com/Sessions or microsoftpdc.com/Videos We also got some questions about requirements.  Hopefully, I can get to them soon. I hope this is a good start!