Microsoft details plans for Visual Studio and .NET

In the wake of the recent PDC and TechEd developer events, Microsoft has decided to put some of its key executives out on the road to explain the innovations that Visual Studio 2010 and .NET 4.0 have in store.

Microsoft is promoting the next version of its Visual Studio toolset, code-named Rosario, as offering new levels of analysis of the application development process.

On the back of a well-rehearsed pledge to democratise the application lifecycle management process, the company is hedging its bets with a set of product enhancements it says will meet the software development needs arising from trends such as virtualisation, cloud computing and parallelism.

Attempting to shed light on the forthcoming tools with a visit to the UK were Redmond-based Jason Zander [pictured, right], general manager for Visual Studio, and Matt Carter [left], group product manager in the same division. ZDNet UK caught up with them both at Microsoft's London headquarters in Victoria.

Q: What's the core technology proposition for the new tools and how will the new releases simplify everyday development tasks?
Carter: with VS2010 [Visual Studio 2010] there will be a strong focus on providing insight into the development process in terms of the structure and function of the code. We're also concerned with making it easier to build web applications. We want to encourage the development of departmental business applications that utilise the Office UI and we want to make SharePoint development feel like Visual Studio development so that usability is improved.

We also want to reach out to C++ developers if they have a large investment in terms of lines of C++ code, so they can now carry those forward into a Visual Studio environment. There will also be evidence of our investments in Visual C++ to simplify development of native Windows 7-based applications, and this will mean support for innovations compliant with Windows 7, such as multitouch user interfaces.

Specifically, how will developers be able to work competently with increasingly complex applications if they adopt the forthcoming tools within the .NET 4.0 framework?
Zander: If you learn a language like C# or Visual Basic and you learn a framework like .NET and how to program against it and combine that with Visual Studio, then those three things together provide a very consistent environment for working towards numerous platforms that you may want to target — complex or otherwise.

This is already the case now, but it will be more so when .NET 4.0 arrives.

If we need the integration elements of Rosario so pressingly, why have the so-called development silos you often talk about developed to such a degree? Surely this segmentation has developed through the use of much of your existing technology.
Zander: In a big enterprise there will always be multiple tiers of development with externally facing elements sitting alongside internal business management needs, so silos will always exist to some degree. What we need to look at now is a situation where, let's say, a procurement department needs to build in a new external web service as well as form tighter links to the rest of the business. What we're trying to do with our tools is make sure the programming for those different segments — and, crucially, being able to stitch them together — becomes a simple task.

Your marketing people are fond of saying VS2010 will "democratise application lifecycle management from architects to developers, to project managers to testers". Where's the substance for that kind of statement?
Carter: The substance, for us, comes from the information share and insight improvements we've made. We've looked very hard at the problem of non-reproducible bugs — when a tester tries unsuccessfully to replicate reported defects. We have a new test tool that allows a developer to view a screen-captured video of the defect as recorded by the tester. At the same time, the developer...