Current state of Visual Studio releases [March 2015]

Hi, my blog readers!

This is the second installment of Visual Studio releases update information on March 2015.

For complete series of Visual Studio releases update of my blog, go to: http://fsharpmonologue.blogspot.com/search/label/Visual%20Studio%20release%20state%20update

For March 2015, we have exciting news about Visual Studio! There are:

1. Visual Studio 2015 CTP 6 (February 2015)
2. Team Foundation Server 2015 CTP (February 2015)
3. Tooling SDK of Windows 10 (official name: Visual Studio Tools for Windows 10 Technical Preview2015

This update is a little bit late (it should be on 19th or 20th March), as I was keeping up with the streaming broadcast of dotnetconf 2015.

The dotnetconf 2015 is an online conference for all of .NET update including .NET Core, WPF, ASP.NET, Roslyn, F# and many more!

Didn’t have time to watch? Watch or download offline at: http://channel9.msdn.com/Events/dotnetConf/2015

ENJOY!

Now, here are the updates…

Overview of the updates on March 2015

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Now let’s dive into those three above!

Visual Studio 2015 CTP 6

Visual Studio 2015 is at CTP 6. The CTP marks that this release is not for “go live” or for production environment. I will keep stating (or reminding) this as many of you, blog readers, including my friends are confusing the CTP for production environment.

This CTP 6 contains these notable features and improvements:

• UI debugging tool for XAML
• Single sign in (with integration to other cloud based authentication)
• Code Lens improvement for Git and also with support for C++, Javascript, and SQL script
• Code Maps improvements such as filtering, faster display (faster diagram rendering) performance
• Visual Studio tools for Cordova now supports Android 4.4 and 5.0 (Lollipop)
• Javascript editor improvement: support for // TODO comments, object literal intellisense
• and many more!

For complete list of CTP 6 release notes, visit: https://www.visualstudio.com/en-us/news/vs2015-vs

The official blog that described this release is available at:

http://blogs.msdn.com/b/visualstudio/archive/2015/02/23/visual-studio-2015-ctp-6-and-team-foundation-server-2015-ctp-released.aspx

With the release of CTP 6, it’s expected that Visual Studio 2015 is nearing the release of Release Candidate. This assumption is safe unless there is a notable bug needs to be fixed.

Special notes:

• The UI debugging tool for XAML in CTP 6 only supports WPF. Support for Windows Store app will be available in the final release.

The UI debugging is surely a very useful feature:

Please check up the original blog post of Visual Studio for more detailed explanation: http://blogs.msdn.com/b/visualstudio/archive/2015/02/23/visual-studio-2015-ctp-6-and-team-foundation-server-2015-ctp-released.aspx

Well.. I suggest you should download the ISO instead of using web installer to minimize error while installing this CTP, since the download is more than 4GB.

Team Foundation Server 2015 CTP

Team Foundation Server 2015 CTP is the next release after the preview release (the same time at Visual Studio 2015 Preview public release).

There are not so may improvements, but the improvements are mostly worthy to be considered:

• REST API support for TFS (previously only available for online TFS, Visual Studio Online)
• Team build improvements, including preview on MSBuild activity on TFS web portal (when accessing TFS via web) and cross platform builds (YESSS!! not just on Windows, now on Linux, XCode, and Android)
• Assign and invite testers
• and more (although it’s not so numerous)

The assign and invite testers is very helpful. Now you can invite testers, attached with the test suite number to test.

This is the screenshot from VisualStudio.com website (link below):

Those  screenshots are taken from the notable release notes of Team Foundation Server 2015 CTP. The official link is:

https://www.visualstudio.com/news/tfs2015-vs

Personal note on TFS:

Compared to other ALM product such as SVN or even commercial one such as StarTeam, TFS has widen the competitive edge. But compared specifically to IBM Rational UrbanCode coupled with IBM Rational Team Concert, TFS is quite on a par to IBM’s.

Visual Studio Tools for Windows 10 Preview (a.k.a. Tool for Windows 10 Preview)

Before you proceed, please read and notice my friendly reminder below.

If you want to try develop apps in Windows 10 Preview, this tooling is the one that you must install after you install Visual Studio 2015 CTP 6.

Why, because Visual Studio 2015 CTP 6 is the prerequisite of this tool.

Yes, the latest Windows 10 Preview on March 2015 is also available to be downloaded! But it is available after you join/register first for the Windows Insider program. Don’t worry, it’s totally free! Just go to this official site: http://windows.microsoft.com/en-us/windows/preview-faq

If you are done installing, there will be a new template for Windows 10 UAP (Universal App Platform) projects, not just the usual Windows 8/Windows 8.1/Windows 8.1 (phone) Universal Apps.

To bring you quick peek, I copy picture from Microsoft’s Somasegar’s blog on Visual Studio Tools for Windows 10:

Here is the original location of Somasegar’s blog entry: http://blogs.msdn.com/b/somasegar/archive/2015/03/23/visual-studio-tools-for-windows-10-technical-preview.aspx

Now what are you waiting for? Code right now, guys! :)

Using Team Explorer Everywhere 2012 Update 1 in Eclipse 4.2 (a.k.a. Eclipse Juno)

Hi there!

In my everyday jobs doing software development tasks (including coding, testing and also managing software requirements), I often use tools to help me. The tools that involves software development teams doing their job to develop software from start to end and also developing future versions of it are often called ALM tools, or Application Lifecycle Management tools.

Before I get down to discussing Team Explorer Everywhere, let me bring you the ALM tools available currently.

These are mature ALM tools currently on market today: (starting from the order of release)

1. IBM Rational Collaborative Lifecycle Management products (yes, they are more than one product under this name)
2. Borland StarTeam for SCM and version control, Caliber for requirement management
3. JIRA (for issue/bug tracking and work item management) and Confluence (for team collaboration) by Atlassian
4. Microsoft Visual Studio Team Foundation Server 2012 with Visual Studio Team Foundation Server 2012 Test Agent

IBM Rational doesn’t have integrated version just like Microsoft has.

Also the offering from Atlassian doesn’t have version controls, although it can be connected to Git or Mercurial. For more info on Atlassian offering, visit this: http://www.atlassian.com/software

The ALM from IBM consists:

1. Rational Requirement Composer (replaces Rational Requisite Pro)
2. Rational Team Concert (will replace Rational ClearCase and ClearQuest)
3. Rational Software Architect (to design business process diagram and other UML, will replace Rational Rose)
4. Rational Quality Manager

For the latest update on IBM Rational ALM offering, visit http://www-142.ibm.com/software/products/us/en/category/SW860

Currently, Rational ClearCase has its own repository infrastructure, not just database. It’s different from Microsoft Visual Studio TFS approach, whereas you can backup the repository by backing up database and setting that TFS used.

I mentioned Microsoft Visual Studio TFS 2012 in the last, because I consider this version can match the maturity of IBM Rational offerings. TFS 2010 can match the IBM Rational, but the requirement management isn’t intuitive enough.

Also even in TFS 2012 I can’t generate or at least make requirement traceability matrix like IBM Rational can.

Those tools above is not interoperable, you have to choose upfront and plan it carefully. Currently, Microsoft supports not just Visual Studio, but Eclipse is also supported for Eclipse 3.5 and 4.2 (Juno).

What about Rational? Currently I can’t find Rational tools from IBM to support VS 2010 or VS 2012. Or if you can correct me, my dear blog reader? I welcome corrections and suggestions!

Using TFS with Visual Studio is easy, using Visual Studio Professional or above edition will have Team Explorer installed, just like this:

It can also connect to Microsoft Visual Studio Team Foundation Service (or simply TFS in the cloud) easily.

But what about Eclipse?

For more info about Juno: http://www.eclipse.org/juno/

The TFS integration tool for Eclipse is freely available to download from Microsoft and it’s fully supported!

The name of the product is Microsoft Visual Studio Team Explorer Everywhere 2012 Update 1. I know, it’s quite mouthful.

Here’s the link to download:

http://www.microsoft.com/en-us/download/details.aspx?id=30661

Any files to download in Microsoft’s download page is free, and it can be a free trial software. But Team Explorer Everywhere is absolutely free and it’s a full working product, not a trial.

But if you want to set up automatically from Eclipse, you can set the Eclipse “Install software” setting to point to Microsoft’s Team Explorer Everywhere download URL.

The detail step by step is also available from the download site, but I’m capturing it for you:

The display will look like this:

Choose it, and install it.

After installing, Eclipse will have a new Team Explorer Everywhere perspective. Open the perspective.

Now you can connect to your own TFS server or connect to Team Foundation Service.

I have used it to connect to my account on Team Foundation Service, the looks is quite similar to Visual Studio Team Explorer:

Now the source control explorer:

Done! But sadly enough, it has no toolbar like the one in VS Team Explorer.

In the future, I will bring more deep conversations and also deep tutorial about ALM using Microsoft Team Foundation Server, after finishing my blog on F#!