Wednesday, November 12, 2008

Finally VSTS product Team did it; Dynamically analyzing your Applications using Visual Studio.Net 2010Using the Threads Profiler

Actually this is a feature that I have waited two years, Since two years ago, I began to work with Intel people over the Intel Thread Checker, and Intel Thread profiler tools. I even have delivered the first course all over the world about how to use Thread Checker, and Thread Profiler. At those days, we in Compu Pharaohs (The company that I work for) has initiated an awareness campaign in cooperation with people at Microsoft Egypt in Order to evangelism for the VSTS 2005. I wished at these days to see some of those tools capabilities to get availed at the VSTS. Actually Intel People told me that there are working with the Microsoft VSTS team in order to include the thread profiler capabilities into the VSTS. Afterwards, I received lots of customers requests for availing the multi-threading profiler inside the VSTS. Sometimes, I replied to those people\s request by what Intel people told me, but inside myself, and as a developer for more than 15 years, I was looking to include the support of dynamic analysis for the multi-threaded applications inside VSTS, not to use the thread profiler. Why?
Because when this is getting included inside the VSTS, it will leverage the power of test case management, work item tracking, and bug tracking.

Today, What I always dreamed off has come true. VSTS 2010 is coming with Multi-Threaded Applications Dynamic Analysis. This means that you will be able to profile your threads, check whether your application is utilizing the parallel resources correctly, or not. If not, how is the workload is distributed over the different threads. How does each thread perform? What is the running code inside each thread…etc?



The above figure shows one of the thread dynamic analysis for a given application.

This actually, can help developers parallel applications developers to develop, and test their applications by an easier year. As many of you know that the parallel processing is nowadays a key factor in the success of many enterprise, as well as critical mission applications. The processors industry nowadays is scaling out by means of adding multiple core processors inside one box. This is due the physics of the processor bus clock speed capacity. Up till the Nano technology could be used into the processors production, the processing clock speed will not increase massively, instead Intel will increase the number of core inside the single-box processor (from 2, to 4, to 8 now,…etc). Developers need to understand this correctly, and design their applications in a multi-threading mode which is currently the only way that can utilize the real power of the multi-core processors. Microsoft he seized this opportunity and introduced at the VS.NET 2010 CTP a Thread profiler that can dynamically analyze the different running threads of the system during running the applications.

Tuesday, November 11, 2008

Tech ED Developer 2008 Keynote Speech VSTS briefing

Jason Zender Announcing the VSTS 2010 Lab Management
Jason Zander kick start Tech·Ed EMEA Developers with his keynote presentation. Jason discusses what the team is doing as the leader of the Visual Studio division at Microsoft to make a developer's job easier with Visual Studio 2010, the next release of the market leading Visual Studio toolkit, and provides extensive examples with Visual Studio 2010 demonstrations.
He has announced again the release of the first available CTP for VS.NET 2010. It is important here to highlight the new features that he has already talked about

Monday, November 10, 2008

What Happens in Tech Ed Developers 2008 This Year:


Welcome from Barcelona, Spain, one of the most attractive cities all over the world, at least for me :)
But what really makes it more attractive these days, is being the incubator for the most important technical event for all developers across EMEA (Europe, Middle East, and Africa) which is Tech Ed Developers 2008. This year, the event seems more blurring, lots of sessions, with higher level than last year (at my opinion). For the second year in row, I contribute at the event as an Expert which really pleased me.



It was nice chance to meet Brian Harry: the Team System GPM (Group Program Manager), Stephanie Saad; the TFS GPM, Mario Rodreguiz; the TFS Architect, and Work Item Tracking Program Manager, and Peter Prosovt; the Architect Edition Program Manager. We discussed many points regarding the coming VSTS 2010 version. And through discussions, as well as through attending there session and knew many important new things that are already have been released into the available CTP, or will be available at the final release but didn't finished yet. For people who didn't love VSTS yet, I promise you to fall in love this time with the release of the 2010 version. I can assure you that :)