Discussing the next major version of its flagship Visual Studio development suite, now known as Visual Studio vNext, Microsoft officials emphasized a focus on Application Lifecycle Management (ALM).
ATLANTA-At its TechEd North America 2011 conference here, Microsoft demonstrated new
capabilities for managing and developing applications for the cloud and devices.
Indeed,
Microsoft Corporate Vice President Robert Wahbe, who kicked off the keynote
address for the event, said the keynote would focus on the cloud and devices,
and how the Microsoft applications and platforms work across the cloud and the
myriad devices cropping up for use by consumers and businesses.
Wahbe
split the keynote responsibilities with Jason Zander. Zander is the corporate
vice president for the Visual Studio team in the Developer Division who at
Microsoft who talked about new features in Visual Studio to support the overall
ALM (Application Lifecycle Management) process. Zander also set out to show how
developers could use Microsoft's Visual Studio tools to build apps for the
public and private cloud as well as for devices that leverage the strength of
Microsoft's management tools for operations.
Moreover,
with organizations facing increased pressure to build, deliver and run
applications across a variety of devices and deployment scenarios, Zander
announced Microsoft's vision for ALM in the next version of Visual Studio,
which he referred to as Visual Studio vNext. With Visual Studio vNext, Zander
said, "We want to pull in even more people, from stakeholders to operations
staff." Though Microsoft has not acknowledged whether the next version of
Visual Studio will be officially known and vNext or Visual Studio 2012, ALM
clearly will play a bigger part in the next release. See the latest Visual
Studio roadmap here.
Zander and Cameron Skinner, general manager of Microsoft's Visual Studio
Ultimate team, described how Microsoft's ALM offering builds on the strong
track record of previous Visual Studio releases, and helps improve the flow of
information between key stakeholders involved in planning, building and
managing applications.
Zander
also demonstrated a connector that links Microsoft System Center Operations
Manager 2007 R2 and Visual Studio Team Foundation Server 2010 to improve the
interaction between the development and operations teams. The connector enables
an operations team to send application performance monitoring and diagnostic
information immediately to the engineering team. Microsoft delivered a
community technology preview of the new connector today, available for download
at https://connect.microsoft.com/OpsMgr/InvitationUse.aspx?ProgramID=7044&InvitationID=OMVS-QVYH-9D3R.
In
a portion of his May 16 blog post on the new connector, Zander said:
"The
relationship between the application development and the IT operations teams is
critical. We've just released a CTP of the new connector between System
Center and Visual Studio Team
Foundation Server (TFS) 2010 that
facilitates the alignment between development and operations. The connector
enables an operations team to assign application performance monitoring and
diagnostic information gathered by System
Center to TFS
for immediate attention and application incident triage by the engineering
team. Using this support, the operations team can easily capture key data (like
call stacks) and automatically deliver them to the engineering team (another
example of actionable feedback)."
Darryl K. Taft covers the development tools and developer-related issues beat from his office in Baltimore. He has more than 10 years of experience in the business and is always looking for the next scoop. Taft is a member of the Association for Computing Machinery (ACM) and was named 'one of the most active middleware reporters in the world' by The Middleware Co. He also has his own card in the 'Who's Who in Enterprise Java' deck.
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