Developing the Application
You perform tasks that involve modifying your application or database code to meet a specific goal and verifying that your changes do not adversely affect other parts of your application. When you or your teams develop an application, you can use Visual Studio Premium or Visual Studio Ultimate to perform common tasks that include implementing features, fixing bugs, coding, and so on. You perform tasks such as these independent of which development process or methods that you follow. In many processes, developers perform design, development, and test tasks repeatedly over the course of an iteration, milestone, or development cycle.
By taking advantage of the integration among the components of Visual Studio, you can perform the following tasks:
Associate your code changes with specific tasks and bugs.
Identify the tests that must be run if you make a particular change.
Plan and track your progress against your schedule.
Common Tasks
In the following table, you can find descriptions of common tasks that support this scenario and links to more information about how you can successfully complete those tasks.
Task |
Supporting Content |
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Identify changes that affect your work: Visual Studio Premium and Visual Studio Ultimate provide you a variety of new or improved features that can help you develop applications. |
What's New for Application Lifecycle Management in Visual Studio 2010 |
Review your existing software and database design: In many cases, the development work that you must perform requires that you change an existing application. Before you begin, you might want to review the architecture and design of that application to better understand where your changes must be made. |
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Prepare a development, staging, or test environment: Before you can create or modify code, you must set up your development and test environments with the appropriate source code. If you are working with databases, you must also have access to the offline representation of those databases. |
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Define rules that identify common coding issues and prevent problematic check-ins: You can specify a set of code analysis rules that you want to use to identify common design, naming, and performance issues in your software or database code. You can group these rules into frequently used sets. You can define check-in policies that use these rules to prevent code from being checked in that could cause problems. |
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Find, manage, and track the work that you must accomplish: The changes that you must make are typically defined in a task, a bug, or another work item. All of these tasks, bugs, and work items can be used to create and manage your development schedule. |
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Make code changes to accomplish a task or fix a bug: During a development cycle, you spend most of your time making code changes. This process includes selecting a task or bug, checking out the required files, modifying the code, and then verifying that your changes are correct before you check them in. This task includes making changes to both application code and database code. |
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Compare and synchronize schemas and data between databases: You can compare and optionally synchronize database schemas between deployed databases. You can also compare and optionally synchronize the data that one or more tables in those databases contain. |
Related Scenarios
Getting Started with Visual Studio Application Lifecycle Management
If you are unfamiliar with Visual Studio Premium or Visual Studio Ultimate, you can learn more about how you can use it in a team development environment to improve productivity and reduce risks that are associated with application development.Modeling the Application
You can use Microsoft Visual Studio Premium to manage the challenges and complexity of designing software. You can use Visual Studio Premium to visually model your application, both as it exists now and as you want it to exist in the future. You can create and maintain diagrams to help you visualize the logical models of your application at the same time that they map to the physical models; this enables you to change, validate, and analyze the software that is "under design."Testing the Application
You can use Visual Studio Premium and Visual Studio Ultimate to be more productive throughout the testing life cycle. You can use Visual Studio Premium or Visual Studio Ultimate to plan your testing effort. You can create, manage, edit, and run both manual and automated tests. You can review your testing progress based on your plan.Building the Application
You can use Team Foundation Build to create and manage automated builds for your code and for your databases. You can create drop servers to deploy builds. You can analyze build trends.Planning and Tracking Projects
You can use Visual Studio Team Foundation Server to plan and track your projects whether you use the agile process, the formal process, or a variation on those processes. By planning your projects, tracking your progress against the plan, and making necessary adjustments, you can reduce risks, avoid unpleasant surprises, and manage the cost of your projects.