Silverlight and Team Foundation Server Basic Edition

Silverlight

At VSLive Orlando last week I went to a couple of Silverlight sessions and talked with several folks at lunch. The main takeaway I got was that Silverlight is clearly the next big thing. After seeing an Intro to Silverlight session, people were asking "Why would I ever use ASP.NET when I can use Silverlight"? You get most of the richness of a client app (except it runs in a sandbox, so no printing or being able to talk to the file system, maybe in future releases?) and your app runs as a browser plug-in, so deployment is a no-brainer. The XAML in Silverlight is a subset of the XAML in WPF, so if you learn one XAML in one you know it in the other. Once caveat: the Silverlight tooling in VS 2008 is not up to par at the moment. For example, in the current release you can't drag controls from the Toolbox onto the designer. You have to write XAML or drags the controls into your XAML. Hopefully, a newer version of the VS 2008 tools will come out with better designer support. And I am sure that VS 2010 will not have this issue.

Takeaway: The time to jump on the Silverlight train is now. And not just if you are a Web developer.

Team Foundation Server Basic Edition

Matt Carter of Microsoft gave a keynote at VSLive. His focus was Visual Studio 2010. The 3 main themes were Creativity unleashed, Simplicity through integration and Quality code ensured. Lots of vision about how VS 2010 would make it easier to built better applications and raise the chances your projects will be successful. Of course, his demos all showed stuff in Team Suite (or whatever the big version will be called next time). How many of us have Team Suite? I do because I have an MSDN Team Suite subscription. However, when we write courseware, we only include things that are in VS Professional, because we can assume everyone has that.

So how is a developer with Pro supposed to take advantage of the project testing and management tooling in Visual Studio? VS 2008 added unit testing. What's coming in VS 2010 for the masses? Matt answered that by announcing Team Foundation Server Basic Installation. This is for individual developers and small teams. Install and configuration will be fast and easy. And you can install it on client machines. He did not specifically mention packaging or pricing, but I'm guessing widespread and cheap. It would likely ship as part of VS Professional and may be available more widely.

Takeaway: In VS 2008, you have to buy Visual Studio Big Daddy Edition to get anything more than unit testing. In VS 2010, Microsoft wants all VS developers to have more tools to help them write better code. I like that.