Top 7 VS 2012 ALM additions

During a technical conversation with one of my colleagues, I have been asked asked about the Top 7 addition to VS 2012 ALM tools from my point of view. I answered as follows:

If we mean ALM tools collectively, not only TFS then, I will say that:

1-SharePoint Testing Support : It is something that came too late but, finally it came to rock.

2-DevOps  tools and techniques : It is a materialization of the Microsoft/Forrrester's Joint study that took place in 2006 (as far as I remember). 70% of Existing IT Budgets in the Fortune 500 Corporation  are spent on maintaining existing systems. Delivering a way to track the quality of systems during their production time became something crucial to have.

3-TFS Service RTM: is a Brilliant offering that will bring new users to the TFS umbrella. Simply it offloads lots of small groups from incurring great amount of Capex budget, and replace it with an affordable Opex budget. Despite the fact of that there is no single clear walk-through that could be provided by the product team to migrate from On Premises solution to the cloud based solution, I expect this service to boom in the next coming years. Moreover, It will open a new opportunity for offshore teams to share their project's artifacts with their primary contractors in a much easier way.

4-The Feedback tool, along with the introduction of Storyboarding tool: It simply bridges the gap between End users, and the product team. In an old study of IBM(late 70s); this gap my cost product team 300+% of the original product cost (Reference:Sarson’s Analysis, and Design Book 1978 edition). The business agility and communication revolution may make this percentage hike up. Storyboarding and Feedback tools could save product teams a hell amount of time, and money that could be lost during the UATs.

5-MTM Enhancements: Despite they are detailed features but i count them important:

• Video Recording Enhancements: It solves lots of storage overflow problems due to video recording sizes.
• Explanatory testing: It provides a better way to implement agile testing technique. Moreover it answer the question that I used to be asked, If we don't have preset Test Cases how can we test using MTM?!
• Testing for Windows Store Applications: It was unexpected to evangelize everywhere for Windows 8 Development while not having an ALM way to make some sort of exploratory and manual testing. It gives a clear message from the ALM team that we are always aligned.

6- Unit testing Enhancements: the new Unit Testing using Fakes Framework: I know that it is a unit testing thing with professional edition but finally it is related to the ALM practices.

• Unit Testing Fakes Framework: I think part of that is related to the Microsoft Research labs efforts during the PEX project which, as far as I know, still running. For years, teams used to use their own fakes framework, or community owned fakes framework. Depending on a Microsoft standard one can streamline unit testing in many good ways. A good scenario that I might recommend Fakes Framework in is the scenario of having a primary contractor that divided a project between him, and one of his partners. They can freely use the same standard framework to makes sure that their unit test can go smoothly based on same unit tests.
• Enhancements happened to the performance of the unit tests.

7- Code Reviews: I consider this tool, a wonderful way for teaming up. Maybe it doesn't have great engineering effort from the product team (which is the same case of storyboarding, and feedback tool) but It is really very helpful towards Bridging Dev/Dev gaps. It materializes a better way for Peer reviewing.

Silverlight Strategy Shift Clarification by Bob Muglia

For People who attended the PDC in Redmond, or attended Local PDC as the one that has been held in Cairo, We all heard from BOB Muglia said that Silverlight strategy has been shifted. This doesn’t mean that Silverlight will die but, it will take a newer vision.

Couple of Minutes ago, Bob himslef has published a message for all PDC attendees clarifying this. The following words are an excerpt from Bob’s message.:

In the interview, I said several things that I want to emphasize:

1. Silverlight is very important and strategic to Microsoft.
2. We’re working hard on the next release of Silverlight, and it will continue to be cross-browser and cross-platform, and run on Windows and Mac.
3. Silverlight is a core application development platform for Windows, and it’s the development platform for Windows Phone.

We haven’t yet publically announced a launch date for the next release of Silverlight, but we’ll talk more about it in the coming months.

Last week, we released some important updates to Silverlight 4, which shipped only six months ago and included major new features and tooling capabilities.  Last week’s updates included improvements to WCF RIA Services, as well as the new Portable Library project –making it easier to share assemblies across SL Desktop, SL Phone, WPF and .NET on the server.  John Papa delivered a PDC session on building business apps with Silverlight 4, and Shawn Burke delivered a PDC session on the portable library project.  I recommend that you take a look at both of these.

Silverlight Strategy

I said, “Our Silverlight strategy and focus going forward has shifted.”  This isn’t a negative statement, but rather, it’s a comment on how the industry has changed and how we’re adapting our Silverlight strategy to take advantage of that.

Below are some of the trends we’re tracking and optimizing around.

Customers are demanding the richest possible client experiences, and developers are increasingly looking to build premium, tailored experiences optimized for specific devices.  Silverlight provides the richest way to build Web-delivered client apps.  In particular, with Silverlight 4, we invested in enabling enterprise application development and now provide an outstanding platform to build rich business applications – both inside and outside the browser.

Customers want to be able to deliver client experiences that are optimized for specific form factors. Silverlight provides a rich UI framework that enables smooth animations and lends itself very well to touch input and embedded devices.  At the PDC last week, we spent a lot of time talking about Windows Phone 7 and how Silverlight provides a great developer platform for creating apps for it.  With the U.S. launch just days away, already we have more than 1,000 Silverlight apps built for Windows Phone, and consumers of the phone will be able to purchase these apps through an integrated marketplace built into each device.  Recently, we’ve also demonstrated Silverlight apps running on Windows Embedded, and Silverlight is a critical component of our three-screen strategy.

Media delivery across the Internet continues to accelerate dramatically.  Customers want HD, studio quality, premium media content.  Silverlight has and will continue to be a pioneering technology that makes it possible to deliver the best media experiences anywhere.  Whether it’s the Olympics, Netflix, or many other media experiences, we have and will continue to invest in it.  Silverlight and IIS Media Services are the choice for premium media experiences with features like HTTP adaptive streaming, DECE-approved content protection, and offline media applications.  In addition, IIS Smooth Streaming enables media delivery to a wide variety of devices, including devices where Silverlight isn’t supported.

Lastly, there has been massive growth in the breadth and diversity of devices made by a wide variety of vendors providing both open and closed systems.  When we started Silverlight, the number of unique/different Internet-connected devices in the world was relatively small, and our goal was to provide the most consistent, richest experience across those devices.  But the world has changed.  As a result, getting a single runtime implementation installed on every potential device is practically impossible.  We think HTML will provide the broadest, cross-platform reach across all these devices.  At Microsoft, we’re committed to building the world’s best implementation of HTML 5 for devices running Windows, and at the PDC, we showed the great progress we’re making on this with IE 9.

The purpose of Silverlight has never been to replace HTML, but rather to do the things that HTML (and other technologies) can’t, and to do so in a way that’s easy for developers to use.  Silverlight enables great client app and media experiences.  It’s now installed on two-thirds of the world’s computers, and more than 600,000 developers currently build software using it.  Make no mistake; we’ll continue to invest in Silverlight and enable developers to build great apps and experiences with it in the future.

 

End of Bob Clarification….

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More and above Steve Ballmer:

has said the following that emphasizes that Silverlight will continue to be a very important product at Microsoft Products’ roadmap :

[We’ve seen the emergence of a wide variety of Internet connected devices – and as I said last week, HTML 5 will provide the broadest, cross-platform reach across these devices, and Microsoft will build the world’s best implementation of HTML 5 for devices running Windows.  At the PDC we showed the great progress we are making on this with IE 9.  We will also enable browser scenarios that provide additional capabilities, including Silverlight.  Silverlight provides the richest media streaming capabilities on the web, and we will continue to deliver that on both Windows and Mac. 

Client applications are important to take maximum advantage of devices, and we will deliver rich platforms and frameworks that enable developers to best take advantage of them.  We’ve sold more than 240 million copies of Windows 7 in the last 12 months - an absolutely phenomenal number.  Developers can build great applications for it using Win32, .NET, Silverlight and HTML5. ]