Whitehorse is Part of the Newly Announced Visual 2005 Studio Team System!

Well, I can’t believe it’s been a month since my last posting. I will try to do better from now. I have been traveling in Europe and tied up at work, but no excuses are really good enough.

 

This week I am in San Diego at the Tech·Ed 2004 conference. Today was a great day for us in the Whitehorse project, as in many ways it was our real “coming out” party.  Whitehorse was revealed to the world officially at last year’s PDC, but today Steve Ballmer, in his opening keynote, announced to a huge crowd the Visual Studio 2005 Team System product line. A closely guarded secret for many months, we are now able to talk about this exciting group of features that’ll ship in Visual Studio 2005 (formerly known as Whidbey). The Whitehorse modeling tools are officially now known as Visual Studio 2005 Team Architect to emphasize the integration with the other capabilities of the Team System. Anyone interested in these tools should check out the Visual Studio 2005 Team System link.

 

Briefly, Team System integrates several new tools into Visual Studio. Amongst these are test case management, unit testing, load testing, code coverage analysis, static code analysis (e.g. scanning code for security problems), dynamic code analysis and profiling. There is also a new server-based product that provides source control, change management, work item tracking, reporting and project management. The Whitehorse modeling tools add the capability for design of connected applications using Web services and “design for deployment” – the scenario I have written about in other postings – as well as class design. Today in SteveB’s keynote, Prashant Sridharan gave just a ten minute demo of some of these features in a brief integrated scenario. There were several spontaneous outbursts of applause from the audience. Folks I’ve spoken to today were delighted by the degree of integration we showed.  I’m looking forward to tomorrow as then we have a chance to go in depth through a detailed scenario that exercises all the tools in a very compelling way.  More of that later.

 

Also tomorrow, I have a session that explains our modeling strategy and how the Whitehorse modeling tools fit into our vision for model driven development. It covers many of the topics I’ve blogged here. Over the next few weeks, my team and I will be publishing several more articles expanding on this vision. These articles start to tell how our vision for Software Factories builds upon model driven development and other key ideas. I’ll be saying more about this in later postings.