Desmond File: VS2010 Boosts ALM Effort -- Visual Studio Magazine

Desmond File

ALM on Microsoft's Mind

When Visual Studio 2010 officially launches next week, it will do more than advance the state of the art in .NET development. It will mark an important change of strategy for Microsoft in the arena of application lifecycle management (ALM).

Gone under VS2010 are the sundry Visual Studio Team System products, which sought to slice and dice ALM tooling for specific roles, such as database, architect and test. As Microsoft Senior Director of Developer Marketing Dave Mendlen tells it, the company learned that professionals in development organizations often wear multiple hats. Forcing them to purchase a mission-specific version of Visual Studio did not work well.

Now the ALM and team-based functionality of VS2010 is spread incrementally through the three main Visual Studio SKUs (Professional, Premier and Ultimate), and the results, according to Forrester Research Vice President Dave West, are impressive.

"VS2010 is an exciting release and a major one," West said in a recent email exchange. "The improvements in the area of Agile development, improved reporting and better testing make VS+TFS (Team Foundation Server) a very compelling story."

West singles out the recent acquisition of TeamPrise, which extends the reach of TFS' collaboration resources to PHP, Java and other non-.NET development environments. He also noted the strong relationship Microsoft has with Micro Focus in the area of COBOL and legacy development.

"If they continue to invest, as they have said they will, they will build out a very strong cross-platform offering."

Posted by Michael Desmond on 04/07/2010

comments powered by Disqus

Featured

Copilot Engineering in the Cloud with Azure and GitHub

Who better to lead a full-day deep dive into this tech than two experts from GitHub, which introduced the original "AI pair programmer" and spawned the ubiquitous Copilot moniker?
Uno Platform Wants Microsoft to Improve .NET WebAssembly in Two Ways

Uno Platform, a third-party dev tooling specialist that caters to .NET developers, published a report on the state of WebAssembly, addressing some shortcomings in the .NET implementation it would like to see Microsoft address.
Random Neighborhoods Regression Using C#

Dr. James McCaffrey from Microsoft Research presents a complete end-to-end demonstration of the random neighborhoods regression technique, where the goal is to predict a single numeric value. Compared to other ML regression techniques, advantages are that it can handle both large and small datasets, and the results are highly interpretable.
As Some Orgs Restrict DeepSeek AI Usage, Microsoft Offers Models and Dev Guidance

While some organizations are restricting employee usage of the new open source DeepSeek AI from a Chinese company due to data collection concerns, Microsoft has taken a different approach.
Useful New-ish Features in .NET/C#

We often hear about the big new features in .NET or C#, but what about all of those lesser known, but useful new features? How exactly do you use constructs like collection indices and ranges, date features, and pattern matching?