...can also view the historical debugging information and machine state at the time of the problem. By lowering barriers and making sure everyone works from the same repository of information, you get a far greater sense of a team and that, for us, represents democratisation.
Visual Studio Team System [VSTS] 2010 architecture is claimed to bring non-technical users into the modelling process to define business and system functionality. How do we keep business managers reigned in to keep their requirement specifications under control?
Carter: It's all about transparency. Through VSTS we will aim to try and make available all the reporting and business intelligence necessary for business users to be able to view the status of a project. So if that reporting exists and is delivered to business users via tools they're used to, such as Excel and Outlook, it must represent a positive addition to the project at hand.
Your next Windows Azure tools are aligned to development for the cloud. How will they look and feel in practice?
Zander: We want to make it possible for developers to use all their .NET programming skills for the cloud. There will be a sandbox security model similar to that which we have provided with the ASP.NET web application framework. The best practices you can find with that technology will also extend to Azure on the cloud.
Carter: With Azure, the key thing is everything will look very familiar to you as a Visual Studio developer, because the programming model is the same. With the same components at hand, we hope developers will see a movement to the cloud as a natural and evolutionary extension.
What tools do you have to help developers with the techniques chip developers say are necessary for multicore?
Zander: In terms of VS2010 and parallel computing, there is a new set of libraries specifically built to enable to developers to write parallel code. At the base level we have a new runtime called the concurrency runtime, which allows me as a developer to take advantage of all the cores present on the machine. Secondly, the tooling inside VS2010 will be enhanced so both the debugger and the profiler are able to track all the extra work you're scheduling for the machine and see how well it is executing.
You're making a big play for web developers with the new products. Other than full support for Silverlight, which we would have expected, what else is new?
Zander: Of course, it's more than just Silverlight support, but as we head towards version 3.0 that will be important. With the new products we have incorporated new model-view-controller (MVC) patterns and we're also shipping the jQuery JavaScript library with VS2010 including full IntelliSense support for auto-completion functions.
VSTS 2010's testing and debugging features have been described as a black-box recorder to help eliminate non-reproducible bugs. Do you think you'll 'eat your own dog food' and improve your own beta releases with this technology?
Zander: Absolutely. One of the sessions people will have seen at PDC and Tech Ed delivered by Stephanie Saad was designed specifically so she could document all the instances where Microsoft is 'dog-fooding' on the development of VS2010 and VSTS. It is used internally right across teams like the Microsoft Office division where thousand of developers will be contributing code at any one time. In fact using 'dog-fooding' as a verb in this way has been the norm at Microsoft for some time now. We're pretty comfortable with it.
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