Some of you may have noticed that the Microsoft Blueprints project has gone quiet and the site taken down from CodePlex and MSDN. I had written a couple of posts about Blueprints in the past and how it was eventually going to take over from GAT/GAX.
Anyway, if you are wondering what’s happening, the answer is that we are making some changes around Blueprints. The Blueprints project was an important incubation whose purpose was to explore process guidance and automation. They helped us (that is, the product teams involved in developing this) gain a better understanding of the requirements for this kind of technology through customer and partner feedback. The reason we took down the external projects was to focus the incubation internally and we are looking at taking this forward so we can support process guidance and automation in a manner that is aligned with VS Team System product direction.
As users of VSTS know, the suite is not based around any particular methodology and can support a range of project methodologies ranging from very lightweight to very formal and process driven. The tooling supports this range of methodologies. Software Factories are an important development discipline which we support and as Jezz Santos and Edward Bakker and other thought leaders have written, it is possible to approach factory development itself in agile or very formal ways and its quite often found that a rapid iterative approach works very well with developing factories That said, VS should and will support factory development going forward in a manner thats agnostic of methodology. Exactly how this manifests itself in the product suite remains to be seen but having looked at the features that are available already in Dev10 Beta-1 in the VS Team Architect edition, we can be sure that it will be of high quality.
GAT/GAX will be available in VS10 and the DSL Toolkit has been improved quite a bit and aligns well with the new “Extensions” model so if you havent checked out the latest developnments in the DSL Toolkit space, I would encourage you to take a look. Stuart Kent has a nice video on the new deployment method for DSL Toolkit based packages.
I will post more on this topic when there is more information that I can share and especially when there are bits available to play with. Watch this space 
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I recently downloaded and installed Dev10 Beta-1 and created some images for my team. The Channel-9 video guiding us step by step through the whole process was invaluable. One thing that had me in trouble was the installation of Full Text Search in SQL 2008 (as TFS requires this feature). When i captured the ISO image (as we usually do in Virtual PC) and installed from there, the installation failed. It turns out that the installation media needed to be inside the VM. That done, the rest of the installation was fine.
Anyway, I then got hold of the VS 10 Training Kit and started with the WF labs. Got one full exercise done. The thing that impressed me most, was not actually WF itself (at this particular time), but the fact that when writing the custom activity, the instructions were to first write a test to check the output of the activity. Not only that, there is also a nod to the BDD side of things as the name of the test was “ShouldReturnExpectedGreeting” (or something along those lines) . Now , if you’ve looked at the various blogs around BDD, one of the first steps (or baby steps if you like) towards proper BDD is to start naming tests like this rather than staid old “TestGreeting” or “GreetingTest“. It may seem like a small thing (and that was my opinion when i started down this route as well), but to me, it made a lot of difference to the way I approached my tests and helped me nail the purpose of the test better , thus also keeping it concise. Aside from this it serves as a form of documentation so a quick glance over your code base (even for your own code when you look at it after a few weeks or months) will bring you or the reviewer upto speed faster than with dodgy or less meaningful names.
In keeping with this emphasis on the test first approach, there is another, older video on Channel 9, part of the same series titled “Code Focussed in VS10” which shows some of the new features that allow us to write the test first and then have the IDE generate the class stubs and method stubs from the test itself. Of course, for those devs using R# and other refactoring tools this is nothing new, but lots of developers dont use them and this is a nice addition to allow us to really write the tests first and stay within the test, fleshing out the class as we go along rather than just writing a failing stub and then switching attention to the class because, unless you are very disciplined once you start working on the class, you tend to leave the tests behind and revisit them later with the attendant refactoring of code and tests.
So, there it was a rather pleasant discovery of a development discipline in a rather unlikely area (considering how design and IDE driven WF is). I’m looking forward to the other labs and I hope this emphasis is in them as well.
Ok, so I’ve been really late to this particular party, but I gotta say, I’m absolutely thrilled with the effect that changing the color schemes of VS has on improving my coding morale!! I’ve been using several schemes from Tomas Restrepo’s collection and its done wonders for me (specifically Ragnorak Blue, Grey and Moria Alternate). Since I’m using VS 2005 and 2008 side by side, I have quite different color schemes for them and it makes things more interesting than the mundane white background. Maybe it’s also age and the fact that my eyes get tired more easily but hey, Consolas at 15pt looks awesome.
Having said this, I also started work on Dev10 and I must say, the OOB color scheme is nice. The new WPF editor renders the fonts much crisper and neater so I’ve been content to leave it without changing to a dark background. I guess we’ll have to wait a while for some new schemes to emerge. Quite sure the new editor has various new options for color schemes.
Another thing that its done, aside from make my IDE look nicer, is that it’s given me a coding boost. In fact, my releasing BizUnitExtensions 3.0 is more down to the new color scheme than anything else .
So, if you havent taken this particular plunge yet, why not try it out?
