Last night I hosted a session about the Visual Studio 2010. Speaker was Gerard van der Pol from Microsoft NL. This time it wasn’t about what’s new with the (obviously) improved IDE and .NET Framework 4, but it was all about the features regarding Team Foundation Server (TFS). Of course, there are lot of new features to talk about and so little time. I’ll describe some features Gerard was demonstrating.
First, let me say that the title of this post is a bit wrong. The brand Team System will disappear, so it is only Visual Studio 2010.
Also, the editions will change a bit:
Regarding to Team System (or should I say ALM) there are 2 new products: Visual Studio Test Elements and Visual Studio Team Lab Management.
With Lab Management it is possible to create and configure your environments to help testers more easily test a variety of configurations in a virtual lab environment, and help developers more easily repro bugs by delivering snapshots of those virtualized environments after bugs are discovered. For more information, watch this Channel9 video.
With Test Record & Playback you can actually record and playback your test plan and steps. The video’s will be accessible for the developer from the work item. For more information, watch this Channel9 video.
Do you recognize this:
- You’ve received reports of a crash from a tester, but on your local box you can’t get the bug to reproduce.
- You’ve received a crash dump from the tester along with the bug. But the call stack that actually caused the crash was just a cascading effect and you can’t trace the bug back to the root issue.
- The bug that you are currently working at resolving has an extremely long set of reproduction steps and you just accidentally stepped over the function that is returning bad data.
IntelliTrace, formerly known as Historical Debugging, can help you out now! IntelliTrace is similar to that of a black box in a plane. It’s keeping track of important points in your programs execution and allow you to play back what happened at those points at a later time. For more information, click here.
With the new Profiler you get a really great look at how your code is performing. It comes with couple of new features for developers:
- CPU Sampling
Measures CPU-bound applications with low overhead. - Instrumentation
Measures function call counts and timing. - .NET Memory Allocation (Sampling)
Track managed memory allocation. - Concurrency
Detect threads memory for other threads.- Collect resource contention data
- Collect thread execution data
Profiler includes a new page called the Function Details page, which will depict the caller/callee information in a graphical way along with the performance metric. You can also view your code which includes the line-level performance measurements.
To end this post, I want to tell you about Gated Check-in. We all have colleagues who are checking in their code and you end up with a non building solution. With Gated Check-in you can prevent users to check-in their code unless it all builds! And it is also possible to run your tests too, before allowing to check-in.
For more information, click here.
I was truly amazed with all the new features of Visual Studio 2010 regarding ALM and had a great night. Go explore for yourself!
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