Visual Studio 2010 Pre-Release CTP

It’s been a while, so much going on, all work related that I hardly have time to get onto my blog.

*UPDATE: //TODO: go through spell check before uploading blog posts

So, finally joined the Live! craze and installed the Windows Live! Beta suite of applications, in particular the new Messenger Live! Beta (neat new UI, digging the WPF approach), Windows Live! Mail which works like a charm for my Live! mail account and of course Windows Live! Writer Beta which I’m currently utilizing for this entry //TODO: Put smiley-face here

So PDC 2008 is officially over and even though I was not fortunate enough to attend (the crappiest thing of being a technology freak, living in South Africa), I could still follow the proceedings thanks to the guys at Channel9 (highly recommend that you guys click through to their site and check out their various coverage material from PDC 2008) and what an interesting session this was, Windows 7 was introduced, even though not majorly different in UI from Vista but will sport the tagline “Less is better”, which I obviously cannot wait to see, Windows 2008 R2 which will be the official Server OS release for Windows 7 (interesting enough, after installing Windows 2008 Data Center, I noticed that they versioned it Windows 6 which is, in theory incorrect as the server releases came out long after Windows 3.1) and then the not-so-secret-anymore Visual Studio 2010 and NetFX 4.0 codenamed “Oslo” which was also made public at PDC.

As I cannot wait for any more screen-casts and tech shots of what VS2010 will sport, I popped over to Microsoft Connect, which hosts the official CTP links for this and downloaded the enormous 7.1GB, 11 part RAR file to see what this Pre-Release has in store. But first a look at the Pre-Release milestone, what it holds for enthusiasts like myself and what not to expect:

1. the download site is huge –> 7GB
2. the extraction is gigantic, totaling at a whopping 24.6GB which is, of course a Virtual Hard Disk (VPC2007SP1)
3. They spared no expense on this, it’s my recommendation that you do not run this VM on any machine lower then an Intel Core 2 system with at least a decent amount of RAM, 2GB just does not do it.
4. why so hectic?
   1. it’s a Windows 2008 Standard installation
   2. it contains Office 2007 (Word, Excel)
   3. it contains an instance of SQL Server 2008
   4. it contains an instance of Visual Studio 2008
   5. Windows SDK 7 is installed
5. it comes with a couple of tutorial tasks
6. it comes with DinnerNow! sample application, which I enjoy pulling apart. makes me realize I know very little about WPF //TODO: get a MR Green emote, that thing rules

After a couple of minutes, I have to say that my home desktop is not of the strongest pieces of machinery available I got into the environment.

Visual Studio 2010 Team System

 

[Figure 1] shows us what the new Welcome (previously called the Start Page) looks like. Notice that the walkthrough tutorials have been set up in the Welcome page. This is a typical Vista approach, sleek, stylish … DAMN SLOW (or maybe just because it’s in a snail-slow VM environment, I don’t know) otherwise not much have changed from a UI perspective. I was hoping to see more collaboration panels in the TS release, something that would reflect project management stats, so that tech-leads and project leaders can have an indication of what’s going on within a specific project, but alas, nothing to that effect.

Apart from the Welcome Page, it’s Visual Studio 2008 to the <T>. Nothing major has been changed on the start up page, we have the Toolbox panel, Solutions panel, etc. On to creating a new project …

[Figure 2] The Framework drop down allows us to compile for NetFX 2.0, 3.0, 3.5 and 4.0 (new Framework) but there is no native support for Silverlight in the project/language type selection. As part of this release I would have expected the development team to include Silverlight, but not there. Means I’ll have to install Expression Studio 2.0 in order to get the VSI templates installed, that’s if they will install within VS2010.

Something new in VS2010 is the Windows Installer XML project which allows you to create WiX packages from within the studio, more about this release here. As I’ve never had the opportunity (Web Developer) to create custom installer packages for my applications, I cannot shed more light on this project type, for now at least.

The last thing to note is a new utility that ships with VS2010, something called Camaro, which is a center to test activities, from a blog post, Microsoft Codename “Camaro” can be summed up as follows, and I quote: “…a tool designed to help testers and test managers to plan, organize and analyze a testing effort.”. [Figure 3] shows the Testing Activity Center, with pre-populated test activities from DinnerNow! application in progress.

For me this pre-release version points out various efforts of Microsoft to improve team production and or release efforts within in teams. This entry is based purely on what I’ve seen in this pre-release and as this is expected to change, I don’t encourage that these screenshots are seen as the final release of the product. I will be following the release of VS2010 with a keen eye and hope that some of you guys out there reading this might have more to add.