Microsoft Visual Studio 2005

The latest version of the most popular RAD environment just got more intelligent with better debugging, Web application developments, as well as overall improvements to the development environment

Sunday, December 18, 2005

A few years back, Microsoft gambled heavily with a new strategy they were adopting and introducing into the Windows development world. This was called .NET and was supposed to change the way developers worked. It started off shakily and slowly, but is now among the top development platforms available. Millions of developers around the world work on .NET to work with small programs to enterprise-level applications. Of course, most of this has been possible because of the excellent rapid application development tool from Microsoft's stables for .NET programming called Visual Studio. The latest version of this tool-MS Visual Studio 2005 (VS05)-has been released worldwide on November 7, 2005 with an Indian mega launch event planned for December in the same year.

Microsoft Visual Studio 2005  Price: Std Edition: Rs 13,688, Pro Edition: Rs 36,578 Meant For: Developers, architects, testers Key Specs: IDE, RAD tools, Windows, Web, Device programmability Pros: Powerful RAD, excellent debugging, power Web app support Cons: None Contact: Microsoft, India. RQS# E59 or SMS 131259 to 9811800601 View the property values and object hierarchy of an instance of any object within your code while debugging

VS05 is a fully revamped RAD tool and is as much a technology jump from VS02/03 as they themselves were from VS6. VS05 is the recommended RAD environment for working with the new .NET framework 2.0.

When you start VS05 for the first time, you are prompted with a choice to make. You can select the kind of programming profile that you will be working with the most. For instance, if you are a WinForms developer in C#, there is a template that you can select. If you are a WebForms developer, you can select that as well to be able to get the template you wish. Remember that these templates are only for the look and feel and can be changed or customized at any time.

Once VS05 starts up, you'll notice that the interface has been cleaned up significantly as well. However, most of the cooler changes come in the actual development part. Here are some of the most significant improvements in VS05.

Debugging enhancements
Debugging has always been a strong point of VS. In VS05, there are a few new features that help you work while debugging.

Edit and Continue: This enables developers to make changes to code during a debugging session and see the results of the code change in the application that is running, immediately. This can be a great time saver since making a small change in the code and viewing the results used to mean stopping the debug, making the change, recompiling and starting the process right from the very beginning.

Data Visualizers: Ever wanted to figure out what the different properties of the different objects in your code are while debugging. Putting watches can be time consuming as well as limiting-how do you define which properties you want to see before knowing what you want to see? The new data visualizers in a debug session let you hover over a particular object and immediately see the entire object hierarchy in a cascading window style with all the current values instantly.

Exception Handling: When your code crashes during a debug session, VS05 throws up an exception-handling window that details why your code crashed, what object/property was in error and which line it was in. Not only this, it offers to create an exception handling routine for you in the 'offending' part of the code. You can even get more help about the error from MSDN (local or online).

Development and coding
There are numerous improvements in the realm of creating an application in VS05. Here are some of the more significant ones.

VSTO: This is a set of 'Tools for Office' APIs that allow developers to quickly use MS Office functionality in their own applications. No longer does one have to figure out the Office object hierarchy and code. VSTO adds abilities to work with the Office applications directly within VS05.

AutoFill Helpers: These helpers aid developers by quickly filling up commonly used UI information automatically. For instance, most Windows applications have a standard set of menus (File, Edit, Window, Help, etc.) as well as a standard toolbar. Instead of having to create this in every application, the developer simply clicks on the helper and it does this for the developer. So you can start doing more important things than creating those same menus over and over again.

Misc UI Helpers: There are many other UI helpers as well. For instance, there are aids to help you align controls on a form without having to resort to pixel positioning. There are other enhancements that enable you to change properties for all the different controls on the form in one go.

Web applications
One of the areas where VS05 has greatly improved upon its predecessors is in the area of Web development. Please note that the following are only a small subset of enhancements and improvements in Web development in VS05.

Controls: There are over 50 new controls in VS05 that you can use in your Web application, which greatly reduce the amount of coding and the time you require. These include things like login controls, wizards, menus, treeviews and many more. Each of them are highly customizable and can be templatized.

Data Access: Accessing data-both for display and updates-is extremely easy now. A new set of data controls let you work with different types of data- databases, Web services, XML, business objects, etc-without even needing to code!

Declarative syntax: Most of the new features in VS05 Web development can be done using XML declarative syntax. This reduces the back-end code-both user written and automatically generated -to almost 10-15% of what was there earlier.

Provider model: ASP.NET provides a number of services-such as membership, role management, profiles, etc. All of these store their data using different data providers. Which means that you can use SQL Server, Access, a Web service or Oracle, etc. to store this without changing any code in the front end.

Development Web Server: You don't require an IIS installed on your machine for doing Web development. VS05 has an internal Web server that runs automatically when developing an application. The advantage of using this is that the Web server is very lightweight and takes very little resources. It also coexists peacefully with any other Web servers you might be running on your machine and can be accessed only from the same machine itself for security reasons.

There are many other enhancements in VS05. WE haven't talked about Visual Studio 2005 Team System and Team Foundation Server, which are bigger and more comprehensive development platforms. Keep an eye on this space for reviews of these in the future.

Bottom Line: VS05 is the premier choice for .NET development. Microsoft's RAD interface allows developers to be much more productive in a shorter amount of time.

Vinod Unny, Enterprise Infotech

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