What's New for Application Lifecycle Management in Visual Studio 2010
You can use Visual Studio to reduce risks and increase the productivity of your application lifecycle.
In this topic, you can learn about tasks that you can perform by using the new and enhanced capabilities and features that are available in the following tools and applications:
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In this topic
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You can use the features provided in this release to perform new tasks that benefit a variety of roles on a product development team.
Software designers and developers
Testers and quality control managers
Version control users
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Build users
Project managers and team members
Administrators
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Installing Components
New or enhanced capabilities |
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Application Lifecycle Management with Visual Studio 2010:
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For more information, see the Microsoft Web site: Visual Studio Developer Center. |
Visual Studio Team Foundation Server 2010:
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For more information, see the Microsoft Web site: Installation Guide for Team Foundation. |
Planning and Tracking Projects by Using Team Foundation Server
New or enhanced capabilities |
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Plan and Schedule Projects:
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View and Track Progress and Report on Your Entire Portfolio: You can identify problem projects and trends by using the following features:
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Office Client Integration:
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Customize and Manage Work Item Tracking:
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Modeling the Application
New or enhanced capabilities |
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Dependency Graphs and Architecture Explorer:
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Code-Based Sequence Diagrams:
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Layer Diagrams:
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Unified Modeling Language (UML) Diagrams:
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Integration of Model Elements with Work Items in Team Foundation Server: Organize the tasks for updating your system by creating and linking work items with model elements. This mapping creates a strong relationship between the parts of your system that are under development and the requirements they must meet. |
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Extensibility for Models and Diagrams:
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Using Version Control
New or enhanced capabilities |
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View Actionable Diagram of Merges: Starting from a file, changeset, branch, or work item, you can quickly retrieve a diagram that displays each merge of a changeset. You can see both where and when the merge occurred. You can also use the diagram to perform common tasks. For example, you can merge a changeset by dragging the changeset to a branch where the changeset is required. |
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View Actionable Diagram of Your Branch Hierarchy: This diagram can help your team members understand your team project's branch hierarchy, get detailed information about each branch, and initiate typical actions such as merges. |
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Resolving File Conflicts in the Pending Changes Window: The Pending Changes window enables you to more quickly and easily resolve file conflicts. |
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View Merges in a File's History: When viewing the history of a file, you can see detailed information about each merge that caused changes to the file. This information includes the branch from which the merge came and the date and time of the merge. You can also drill down and view details about the changeset in which the changes were made. |
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Manage Labels: The new Label window gives you tools that make it easier to apply, edit, remove, and manage your labels. |
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Rollback: You can use the tf rollback command to eliminate the affect of one or more changesets on an item. |
Developing the Application
Poznámka
The features that formerly released as Team System 2008 Database Edition are now included as part of Visual Studio, Visual Studio Premium, and Visual Studio Ultimate.
New or enhanced capabilities |
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Debug code faster with IntelliTrace: IntelliTrace, available in Visual Studio Ultimate, improves debugging productivity by reducing the time that is required to reproduce and diagnose an error in your code. Unlike the standard debugger, which shows the state of the system at a point in time, IntelliTrace captures and records what the application does over time. When an error occurs, you can view the state of the system at any time from the start to the point of the error. Additionally, because testers can record a historical debugging session in the environment in which a bug occurred, IntelliTrace reduces the chance of not being able to reproduce a bug. |
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Manage Database Change: The features that formerly released as Visual Studio Team System 2008 Database Edition are now included as part of Visual Studio, Visual Studio Premium, and Visual Studio Ultimate. As a result, you can apply the same life-cycle tools to your database code that you apply to your application code. |
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Support Database Schema Providers From Other Companies: You can add database providers from other companies to manage changes to database servers other than SQL Server. The specific feature extensions depend on the database providers. For example, other database providers might support different types of database refactoring operations. |
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Improve Code Quality With Code Analysis Tools: Focus on your critical quality goals by using managed code rule sets to organize code analysis rules and check-in policies. |
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Keep Tests Up-To-Date with Test Impact Analysis: You can see a list of both manual and unit tests that are affected by your target code changes by using Test Impact Analysis. As you run those tests, the test list adjusts to show only the remaining tests. Additional code changes adjust the list of unit tests, as do tests that are running on the server. You can also predict many potential check-in problems that would otherwise have gone into your build and remained undetected. |
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Analyze Application Performance with the Performance Profiler:
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Remotely Debug Message Passing Interface (MPI) Applications that are Running on a Windows HPC Cluster: You can use the MPI Cluster Debugger to simplify debugging multiple cooperating processes that are running on a remote cluster. By using the MPI Cluster Debugger, you can easily deploy required files to the cluster nodes, open the remote debugger on each cluster node, and clean up after the debugging session has ended. |
Testing the Application
For testers, there are many new features in Visual Studio 2010. You can now plan your testing effort. This includes creating test plans, test suites, test configurations, and test cases with individual test steps using the new application for testers called Microsoft Test Manager as shown in the following illustration. These artifacts are now part of your team project.
The tester benefits from being able to gather diagnostic information when you run tests and automatically adding this information to a bug. The tester can collect details of the actions that are performed when you run a manual test case. These details can be used the next time to fast forward manual testing.
Three products provide testing functionality in Visual Studio 2010:
Visual Studio Test Professional: This is primarily for the generalist tester who wants to create manual test cases, run these and view the results as part of a test plan. This product includes the new application called Microsoft Test Manager. This product can be installed quickly and easily on the test machine where the tester wants to run their tests. You can also run automated tests from Microsoft Test Manager if an automated test is associated with a test case using functionality in one of the following two products.
Poznámka
Visual Studio 2010 is not provided as part of Test Professional.
Visual Studio 2010 Premium: By using this product, users can create unit tests and UI automated tests for an application. The tests that are created can be run from Microsoft Visual Studio 2010, run at a command prompt, run from Team Foundation Build, or associated with a test case and run from a test plan by using Microsoft Test Manager.
Poznámka
Microsoft Test Manager is not part of Visual Studio 2010 Premium.
Visual Studio 2010 Ultimate: This product contains all the test functionality in Visual Studio 2010. It includes Microsoft Test Manager, which provides the functionality for planning, creating, and running test cases. Users can also create and run unit tests, UI automated tests, load tests and Web performance tests, generic tests, and ordered tests by using Microsoft Visual Studio 2010. These automated tests can be run from Microsoft Visual Studio 2010, run at a command prompt, run from Team Foundation Build, or associated with a test case and run from a test plan by using Microsoft Test Manager.
Poznámka
If you want to run load tests and simulate multiple users, you must also purchase a virtual user license.
New or enhanced capabilities |
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Define Your Testing Effort: You can easily define your testing effort for a specific iteration in your project and measure your progress by using a new application for testers, which is called Test Manager. You can create test plans, test suites, test configurations and test cases to define the testing required. |
Visual Studio Test Professional or Visual Studio 2010 Ultimate |
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Create and Run Manual Tests: You can create manual test cases that contain individual test steps by using Test Manager. Each test step includes an action to perform and can specify an expected result. You can run these tests and mark each step as passed or failed as you perform the actions on your application under test. You can also create shared steps that are common to multiple test cases, in order to reduce the time that is required to create test steps, in addition to the ongoing maintenance costs. |
Visual Studio Test Professional or Visual Studio 2010 Ultimate |
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Record Manual Test Steps for Playback: You can create recordings of actions you perform for a manual test case. You can play back this recording to quickly fast forward through steps in a test to verify a bug has been fixed. |
Visual Studio Test Professional or Visual Studio 2010 Ultimate |
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Create Automated UI Tests: You can create automated UI tests, known as coded UI tests. You can import recorded actions and generate code that represents your UI controls, or you can locate your UI controls and perform actions on them. You can then add validation code to check that your application under test is working correctly. |
Visual Studio Test Professional or Visual Studio 2010 Ultimate or Visual Studio 2010 Premium |
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Create Physical or Virtual Test Environments To Use To Deploy Your Application or Run Your Tests: You can create physical or virtual environments that contain the set of roles that are required to run a specific application and the machines that you can use for each role. |
To create physical environments, you must have one of the following products: Visual Studio Test Professional or Visual Studio 2010 Ultimate You must also install test agents and test controllers, which are available from Microsoft Visual Studio Agents 2010. To create virtual environments, you must have one of the following products: Visual Studio Test Professional with MSDN or Visual Studio 2010 Ultimate with MSDN For the virtual machines that you create with Lab Management, you must install lab agents, test agents, build agents, and test controllers as required from Microsoft Visual Studio Agents 2010. |
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Collect Diagnostic Data or Affect Your Test Machine and Easily Add Collected Data to a Bug: When you run a manual test with Test Runner, you can now make a video recording of the test case, or record the actions to a log file. You can add comments, and files such as screenshots when you run the test. In addition, for tests on applications which are in virtual environments, you can take snapshots of the environment and attach them to the bug. When you run tests you can also collect diagnostic trace data (called Intellitrace data), code coverage data, or test impact analysis data. You can have your computer emulate a specific network, or you can create your own custom data diagnostic adapter. If a test fails, you can create a bug by using Test Runner. This bug is automatically populated with the data that you collected, so that a developer can find all the information that is required to fix the bug. |
Visual Studio Test Professional or Visual Studio 2010 Ultimate |
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Group Your Automated Tests By Using Test Categories: You can now group your automated tests using test categories, which are more flexible than test lists. |
Visual Studio Test Professional or Visual Studio 2010 Ultimate or Visual Studio 2010 Premium |
Building and Releasing the Application
New or enhanced capabilities |
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Increased Flexibility to Customize, Change, and Scale Out Your Build System: Whether your organization is a small startup with simple needs or a large and complex enterprise, you can design a build system topology to meet your needs today. As your code base expands and your team grows, you can quickly and easily scale your build system out one build machine (either physical or virtual) at a time. Additional flexibility in Team Foundation Build means increased productivity for your software developers and testers. For example, build agents can be pooled and shared across an entire team project collection to ensure an efficient use of your build system hardware resources. Pools of build agents are managed by a new entity known as a build controller. No longer does a queued build need to be stalled waiting for a single build agent to become available. The build controller delegates work to an available build agent that meets those requirements. |
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Easy to Create and Modify Build Definitions: You can use the Default Template to quickly define a build definition that performs the most common build tasks such as compiling code, running tests, and dropping the binaries. You can later go back and modify the build definition by using the same simple user interface. |
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Create a Custom Build Process Using Windows Workflow Designer: You can create a richly customized build process by using the Windows Workflow Designer. |
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Full Support for Legacy Build Definitions: You can use the Upgrade Template to continue to use the following kinds of build objects:
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Gated Check-in and Private Builds: Build breaks can prevent your team from making progress while you diagnose and correct the problem. You can define a gated check-in build definition to protect some or all of your codebase against build breaks. When gated check-in is enabled, changes that affect your build are automatically shelved and a build of that shelveset is queued. The changes will only be committed to version control if the build succeeds. Your developers can also queue a private build of their code changes before trying to check them in. |
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Publish Data to Symbol Server: You can configure your build definition to publish symbols data to enable features such as Intellitrace. |
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Enhanced Reports of Ongoing and Completed Builds: When you double-click an ongoing or completed build in Build Explorer, the system displays an easy to navigate and detailed view of data displayed in a rich UI which helps you to perform actions. For example:
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Incorporating Virtualization
Visual Studio Lab Management enables you to create, assign, and track virtual environments to use in your virtual lab. The environments can be used for application development, deployment, and testing.
New capabilities |
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Create Multi-tiered Environments for Developing and Staging Your Application: You can quickly create virtual environments that contain multiple virtual machines for running unit tests when you code an application or functional tests when you test it. You create these environments from clean virtual machines and templates that specify the role for which each virtual machine is used in your virtual environment. This reduces the time that you must spend to set up machines and increases the time that you can spend testing. You can also create copies of environments without name conflicts by using network isolation. |
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Automatically Deploy Applications to Virtual Environments: You can use Windows workflow to automatically deploy new builds of your application to virtual machines and then run verification tests. |
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Use Virtual Environments When Filing Bugs and Reproducing Bugs In Your Application: Testers can run tests on virtual environments, and, when they discover a difficult problem, attach snapshots of the environment to the bug. Developers can then connect to the snapshot of the environment where the bug was found to more easily reproduce it. |
Administering Team Foundation
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Team Foundation Administration Console: You can review the status of the servers that host the application services and configuration database, add or remove SharePoint Web applications for hosting team project portals, and manage team project collections. |
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SharePoint Web Applications: You can use more than one SharePoint Web application for hosting the Web sites used as team project portals. |
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Project Collections: You can group projects that have similar needs or objectives, or that share common user groups, server resources, and maintenance schedule. |
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Add Servers to Existing Deployments: You can use more than one server that is running SQL Server for hosting the databases for your deployment. If you have a network load balancer (NLB) installed and configured in your deployment, you can add more application-tier servers to transparently balance the load between servers in large-scale deployments. |
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Automatic Update of Work Item Fields that Store Person Names: You can update the name of a team member in Active Directory, and the change is automatically updated in the corresponding work item fields at the next synchronization. Automatic propagation of name changes is made to work items, work item histories, queries, and alert notifications. |