Do you want to discuss features available in Team Foundation Server, Team Suite, Architecture Edition, Development Edition, Database Edition, and Test Edition? You can join members of the Visual Studio Team System product group chats.

There will be two chat sessions.  (times in the Jerusalem time zone)

• Join the chat on Wednesday, December 5th, 2007 from 20:00 – 21:00 Jerusalem Time. Add to Calendar
• Join the chat on Thursday, December 6th, 2007 from 02:00AM – 03:00AM Jerusalem Time. Add to Calendar

Tags: Team System, Visual Studio Team System

VS 2005 introduced internal static analysis tools. This helps you to write secure and quality code.

Visual Studio 2008 has new Code Analysis features:

• Code Metrics – This gives you the ability to dig deep to find those un-maintainable and complex hotspots. Code Metrics will ship with five metrics – Cyclomatic Complexity, Depth of Inheritance, Class Coupling, Lines of Code and Maintainability Index.
• Analysis improvements:
  • Support for analyzing anonymous methods and lambda expressions
  • Reduced noise in existing analysis and the ability to skip over tool generated code
  • New analysis, including additional rules around security, globalization, maintainability and spelling.

To generate code metrics, simply do the following:In Solution Explorer, right-click on your solution/project and choose Generate Code Metrics

After generation you’ll get the Code Metrics Results window and a tooltip on every column that explain the result. The Maintainability Index column includes a maintainability indicator light that changes based on the maintainability of the code. Green indicates good maintainability, yellow indicates moderate maintainability, and red indicates poor maintainability.

Tags: Code Analysis, Coding Standards, Visual Studio 2008, Visual Studio Team System

If you are using the VPC provided by Microsoft to evaluation Visual Studio and Team Foundation Server 2008 Beta2 be aware it will expire Nov 1st.

See Jeff Beehler’s post for more details.

Tags: Team System, Visual Studio 2008, Visual Studio Team System

Brian Harry just posted that Rosario CTP8 will be available for a first view in a week or so.

The primary features in this CTP include new tools for the manual tester and work item linking and hierarchy support.

Be also aware of the fact that Orcas Beta2 is also ready to go and will be released in the near future.

Have fun!

Tags: Rosario, Team System 2010, Visual Studio 2008, Visual Studio Team System

A common question by asp.net developers is what project model should I use for asp.net application? Web Site project (which introduced with VS 2005) or Web Application project (which delivered as add-in for VS 2005 and built-in within VS 2005 SP1)?

There is no thumb rule. Every project model has it’s own advantages (and diss-advantages off course…). I hope this post will help you to understand better the differences between 2 of them.

Web Application project model

• Provides the same Web project semantics as Visual Studio .NET 2003 Web projects.
• Has a project file (structure based on project files).
• Build model – all code in the project is compiled into a single assembly.
• Supports both IIS and the built-in ASP.NET Development Server.
• Supports all the features of Visual Studio 2005 (refactoring, generics, etc.) and of ASP.NET 2.0 (master pages, membership and login, site navigation, themes, etc).
• Using FrontPage Server Extensions (FPSE) are no longer a requirement.

Web Site project model

• No project file (Based on file system).
• New compilation model.  (Read here or here for more details) and …
• Dynamic compilation and working on pages without building entire site on each page view.
• Supports both IIS and the built-in ASP.NET Development Server.
• Each page has it’s own assembly.
• Different code model.  (Read here for more details)

Ok, all is great, but you want to create your web site now. Which model should you use?

• You need to migrate large Visual Studio .NET 2003 applications to VS 2005? use the Web Application project.
• You want to open and edit any directory as a Web project without creating a project file? use Web Site project.
• You need to add pre-build and post-build steps during compilation? use Web Application project.
• You need to build a Web application using multiple Web projects? use Web Application project.
• You want to generate one assembly for each page? use Web Site project. 
• You prefer dynamic compilation and working on pages without building entire site on each page view? use Web Site project. 
• You prefer single-page code model to code-behind model? use Web Site project.

Tags: .NET, ASP.NET, visual studio, Visual Studio 2005, Visual Studio 2008, Visual Studio Team System