In Visual Studio 2008, Microsoft is continuing to invest in the market-leading Visual Studio Team System technology. Visual Studio 2008 provides great support for not only managing the entire software development life cycle but also the critical interaction with the final users and managers of an enterprise application. In addition, it is designed to expand the collaborative benefits of the Visual Studio Team System to more roles on the project team.
By addressing the needs of a wide range of customers, from the smallest independent developers to the largest enterprise customers, Visual Studio 2008 will make delivering quality solutions easy regardless of the size of the project or team.
With this release the new capabilities include:
· Integrate the database professional into the software life cycle
o Creating off-line database representations and database projects brings the database professional into the development life cycle. Visual Studio 2008 provides a full suite of tools source control, testing and test data generation, rename refactoring, and a deployment solution that includes visual diff/merge and deploy script generation.
· Extend Visual Studio's Unit Testing capabilities
o Unit testing is easily one of the most sought after abilities incorporated into Visual Studio. This release extends its capabilities, improving its performance and broadening its reach: unit tests now run faster whether they're executed from the IDE or from the command-line; test inheritance enables users to reuse inherited methods; usability improvements enable users to execute a test directly from its definition; unit tests are now available to all Visual Studio Professional Edition users and can also be used to test mobile applications.
· Load testing for the enterprise
o Visual Studio 2008 improves on existing load testing capabilities by simplifying the load testing interface and providing a multiple machine graph view that brings together the test results, performance, and health of all the machines under test. Additional improvements enable better management of the test results, rich load modeling, and the integration of results from non-PerfMon sources.
· Enable performance tuning and diagnostics of enterprise applications through testing
A new area of support in Visual Studio is the ability to drive system performance tuning and diagnostics through the Visual Studio test tools. This enables developers to run profiling during tests, so they can run load and test procedures against a system, see how it behaves, and use integrated tools to profile, debug, and tune. Also included is performance base-lining, so that users can save a baseline profile and then, if the performance degrades, compare up-to-date traces to identify the source of the regression.
Comments