Developers moving into VS 2005 say foundation for collaboration is poured, but features still ... UNDER CONSTRUCTION

By P. J. Connolly

November 15, 2006 —

Microsoft’s Visual Studio development platform has been a cornerstone of the company’s development strategy for years. Essentially, if one intends to develop for .NET, the Visual Studio IDE is the only reasonable choice of tool. Although the community seems to be satisfied with the core of the ecosystem—the core IDE, languages and so forth—some discontent with the way Microsoft has handled the challenges of a rapidly shifting landscape lies just below the surface.

With Windows Vista due to land in the hands of business customers at any moment and general availability due at the end of January, there’s a growing sense that Microsoft may unintentionally be offering its customers an excuse to avoid the new operating system. The disconnected release of the APIs in Vista, and the tools to fully exploit them—not due until the release sometime next year, maybe, of Visual Studio “Orcas”—provides another reason for businesses to do so, beyond Vista’s hardware demands.

But perhaps of most concern to enterprise developers is a sense that the key collaboration tools Microsoft offers to developers—the Visual Studio Team Foundation Server and the associated role-based packages aimed at architects, testers and, soon, database professionals—are a long way from being complete.

A CUSTOMER LOOKS AT TFS
In conversations with members of the Visual Studio community, there appeared to be a great deal of agreement that Visual Studio’s Team Foundation Server (TFS) has a way to go before it’s as mature as the rest of Visual Studio. Although several people echoed these sentiments during interviews, one was particularly eloquent on the pros as well as the cons of TFS.

Chris Kinsman, founder of custom development organization Vergent Software, described the experiences of his developers as being typical of “a 1.0 release, with all that implies and intends.” Vergent’s development teams started using TFS because source code control was an issue for them and the mix of CVS and VSS (Visual Source Safe) wasn’t getting the job done.

“From the source control standpoint, they’re happy, compared to where they were using WinCVS or VSS,” Kinsman noted. “The features that are in TFS…are pretty darn solid; they haven’t run into too many issues with them, doing…the typical things you might want to do with a high-end package.” Once you begin to go outside the core, however, the story changes, he chuckled.

“Typically, the next thing they want to look at [is] the team build tool,” Kinsman continued. “They hop on the build bandwagon, and the problem that they find…is that it is a very lightweight one-way wizard that, unless you have the simplest build in the world, is not going to fulfill your needs.” Even then, he pointed out, instead of a usable front end, his coders find themselves “getting down and mucking around in XML.”

Even worse, he noted, is “the lack of continuous integration. [There’s] not even a way to schedule a build; you have to go out and use Schedule Tasks in the operating system.”

TROUBLE AT CHECK-IN
Check-in policies are another area in which Kinsman and his developers see TFS as being not quite there yet. Developers “really like the idea of check-in policies in the source control system. The problem is the way you develop check-in policies forces to you to figure out how you’re going to deploy the check-in policies, because they’re actually client-side source code that lives on the desktop, that are not deployed by TFS.”

Kinsman believes the concept of work items, such as defects and features, is a good one, but the execution in TFS falls short. “The story behind work items is fairly strong; it makes sense. I couldn’t count the number of tools we had for tracking defects, features and everything else, that had been built internally over the last 20 years.”

Kinsman likes the idea of using a centralized repository for work item storage, but what happens when his developers need to edit or change the behavior of the work items is ugly. “If you want to edit one, you get a big giant XML file and you start typing,” he said. Developers have no front end for work items and are forced to “tweak some XML, put it back in there, see what it looks like, take it back out”—hardly an easy or efficient process.

At Vergent, the next problem surfaces when trying to accommodate the work items that come from the field. Kinsman explained that “defects that a customer reported typically come in through other systems—in our case, PeopleSoft. As problems need to be escalated…into what developers use, there’s really no conduit.” The upside for him is that TFS has what he called a great API, which his crew is using to build its own PeopleSoft connector.

Kinsman’s final issue with TFS is scalability. At the team level, TFS “works great,” he said. “But if I want to look at my project portfolio across the company, it completely falls apart.” The problem, he argued, is that no way exists to quickly roll up data across the entire development organization, or to provide an enterprisewide view of developer activity.

HOW SCALABLE?
Forrester Research vice president and research director Mike Gilpin agreed that TFS has some growing ahead of it. Nevertheless, he sees it as valuable in light of new concerns for software development managers. “One of the opportunities that now unfolds before Microsoft is in taking the core technologies for Team Foundation Server and using that to enable some of the other kinds of capabilities that you would expect repository technology to enable, such as governance of the life cycle in general, and SOA policies in particular.”

But he noted that there’s a tug of war within Microsoft over how scalable TFS really needs to be. “Our own data shows that big projects are not the factor they once were,” Gilpin noted. “The typical project size today is fewer than six developers working for fewer than six months to deliver. Cycle times are moving down even more when you look at the Web 2.0 context, where people may update capabilities on their site once a week, or even multiple times per day at the bleeding edge.”

Gilpin continued, “As those cycle times shrink, the concern that developers have in that small-team rapid-cycle-time situation are less about those big enterprise concerns like SOA governance, and more around: ‘How can I turn the crank faster than I’m turning it today?’”

ORCAS STILL UNDERWATER
But the other elephant in the room is Windows Vista and the lack of production-grade tooling for the flagship operating system. Tim Huckaby, CEO of enterprise application developer Interknowlogy, noted, “That’s the big problem. The Windows guys create something awesome in the plumbing, and then the tool’s got to catch up to make it easy to implement.”

Huckaby believes that, for now, development in the Windows Presentation Framework (WPF, formerly Avalon) requires “some slinging of some code and some good developers to get that thing to sing, only because currently WPF is not shipping, and inherently, the tool’s not ready yet.”

Huckaby and his developers are looking to the next release of Visual Studio—rumored for next year and code-named Orcas—to make up for the current shortcomings. “The bold promise of Orcas is to make WPF easy, just as easy as it is for WinForms, and [make] things like drag-and-drop 3D realistic.”

Huckaby believes Microsoft has a solid foundation in the current release. “Whidbey [Visual Studio 2005] is awesome; it’s a fantastic tool.” But, he conceded, “we’re eons away from an Orcas build that we can use.”

UPHILL VISTA BATTLE
Forrester’s Gilpin agreed that developers looking to exploit Vista face an uphill battle. “It would be much better if the tooling to take advantage of those new capabilities was GA within a short period of time following the availability of Vista. The fact that it’s not, the fact that you have to use bits of add-on technology that you pull off of MSDN, and those are pre-release bits…adds to the complexity of the process of establishing a development environment and creates ongoing headaches for people who are trying to develop for Vista.”

Gilpin pointed out, “For any particular project, the need to target Vista may not involve that significant an embrace of the new features and functions.” However, and “especially if you’re an ISV, and you’re looking to build packages that exploit some of the rich graphics capabilities of WPF or things of that nature, you’re really wishing that you had a lot more in the way of tooling today.”

Gilpin noted that many developers won’t care as much about the interface as they will about Vista’s new communications framework. “It might be nice to have more tooling for automating the usage of some of the new capabilities in WCF, but you can get by just calling those APIs in your application as they’re currently provided, and it’s not really that big of a deal.”

But it’s not just the advance of software paradigms that may cause headaches for Microsoft. Industry pundit and SD Times columnist Larry O’Brien pointed out that the explosion of multicore CPU designs creates a new challenge for developers that today’s languages simply aren’t prepared to meet.

So where does Microsoft go from here with Visual Studio? The most obvious answer is: Get cracking on Orcas to resolve the Vista tooling issue. The more difficult problem is how to address the collaboration needs of developers with Team Foundation Server.

Vergent’s Kinsman and his developers seem to be the tip of an iceberg, in calling for more scalability. But if Gilpin’s analysis is correct, Microsoft has to figure out a way to package TFS and the associated role-based packages in a way that makes sense for smaller shops with a handful of developers, as well as the big ones.

Share this link: http://www.sdtimes.com/link/29789

Free Software Foundation challenges Cisco in lawsuit After years of negotiation failed to come up with a settlement, the Free Software Foundation has sued Cisco over GPL violations present in its Linksys line of products. This marks the first time that the FSF has sued a large corporation.

IBM boosts analysis features in collaborative platform Rational Quality Manager gives real-time data to software development teams, giving both developers and business professionals what they need to make informed testing decisions. The platform uses predictive algorithms to determine which software works best with which browsers.

Innovations Software enables business rules collaboration Visual Rules Enterprise Platform 4.3 provides tools for helping users create and alter business rules by managing access control and auditing changes to rules. The visual designer is based on Eclipse.

Add comment

Name*
Email*
Country

Comment
Preview

News on Monday
more>>
SharePoint Tech Report
more>>

Download Current Issue
ISSUE 3/15/2010 PDF

Need Back Issues?
DOWNLOAD HERE

Receive the print Edition?

Google Code turns 5
Google Code Turns 5, and adds a Paxos Algorithm to make the system more stable and reliable.
03/17/2010 11:16 AM EST

Test your Visual Studio 2010 know-how
Microsoft is offering free beta certification exams for Visual Studio 2010.
03/17/2010 11:08 AM EST

Microsoft lifts the hood on IE9
Microsoft is previewing IE9.
03/16/2010 01:10 PM EST