So, I've been moved to a new team.  I'm the Dev Lead for the team that is responsible for the Profiling core features of Visual Studio.  I'm looking forward to getting into some low-level operations after having spent quite a bit of time with VS Extensibility and most recently Diagramming.  I'm kind of excited to get back to some core developer activities like debugging and profiling.  I'm close to the debugger team now and we're looking at ways to share some functionality in the future.

For the next version of Visual Studio, I hope to provide some great Profiling tools that you can use to continue to tune your code to get the most out of the CPU, Memory, Disk and Network.  It's all hush-hush right now because we aren't allowed to disclose anything, but stay tuned as I turn this blog into Profiling-relative way to disseminate information about development life at Microsoft and my personal spin on conditions of the universe.

On a personal note, nice to run into Scott and Jacob, two colleagues from Hawaii that I worked with on Progression.  Seeing them makes me relish some snorkeling and plumeria.

Aloha,

Allen

Download Visual Studio 2010 Express for Windows Phone CTP

Exciting mobile development changes you won't want to miss if you do any kind of small form-factor development.

I added a countdown control which links to the "Ultimate Offer" - check it out.

Why the name 'Progression'?

First the name 'Progression'.  Progression attempts to aid in the evolution of software, hence the name 'Progression'.  It's kind of a code-name, but more than that when you think about how software progresses over time.  These tools aim to aid in the discovery of how software progresses and aid in the decision making that developers and architects make to advance (i.e. progress) their software in the future.

At it's heart Progression is a directed graph.  The directed graph is very flexible in that it simply contains Nodes and Links (vertices and edges in some nomenclature).  Graphs can be used to depict just about any kind of relationship between Nodes.  It's the classification of the Nodes and Links that give the graph some meaning.  Graphs can contain nodes for people, animals, pharmaceuticals, institutions, families, species, geographies, planets, molecules, etc.  When it comes to understanding a conceptual model of software a graph might contains nodes for computers, applications, assemblies, classes, methods, files, projects, solutions, etc.  Graphs can contain links for relationships between the nodes.  In the case of people, links can be used to indicate relationships such as parent/child, manager/employee, coworkers, neighbors, etc.  In sociology these relationships between people are the basis for the science of groups of people.  For software, graphs can contain links for relationships such as Contains (assembly contains a class, for instance, or class contain a method), calls (method calls method, for instance), references (for assemblies that reference another assembly and therefore need that assembly to be available at load-time).  Progression attempts to bring the science of networks to software itself.

Progression collects and manages such data about software projects.  Now one of the really cool things about Progression is that it isn't limited to software.  Under the covers it could manipulate any kind of directed graph (like a social network described above).  But the team creating Progression isn't just passionate about directed graphs, we're really excited to solve certain software development challenges.  So the sweet spot for the features in Progression is all about software.

Progression provides some user interface elements to expose this data to developers and architects in a way that they can use to help them solve software development problems. 

What are some of the problems that Progression allows the developer/architect to solve? 

First is Architectural Discovery.  This is the concept where a developer is introduced to a new code base and needs to understand how it works under the covers.  Progression provides many different ways to display and explore the data in the graph of code, assemblies, classes, methods, etc.  It's the visualization of these elements that allows the developer to see a big picture and dive into details in order to learn how things related and work together (hopefully well, but sometimes not very well at all!).

The second problems that Progression solves is allowing the user to browse rich unending data.  Directed graphs can have cycles.  Directed graphs can also be used to hold just about any kind of data.  Progression provides a tool to browse such information in a tabular way that allows expansing and navigation even in the face of cycles and data that seemingly never ends.  We've done a lot of work to enable this kind of flexibility in a general purpose tool.

With these tools one can answer questions like: What are my unused pieces of code?  What are the cyclic dependencies in my code?  What are the important hubs in my system?

Real software, not slide-ware

Progression isn't very interested in simply documenting the architecture of a system as a communications mechanism.  There are plenty of documents, modeling languages, power-point and visio features that can be used to draw a model of a system.  They all can be used without any code at all being in existence.  These things can be really useful, but that's not what Progression is about.  Progression, instead, conveys the actual software architecture based on reverse engineering binaries and sniffing out code as it's being written.  It works very deeply with the Visual Studio development environment and the CLR/.Net Framework to get the information it conveys.  As such it's a reflection of the actual code, not a conceptual model that gets stale quickly after coding begins.  Used in conjunction with modeling tools, Progression provides the linkage to actual implementation to verify the implementation against the conceptual design.  This provides an 'as-is' versus 'to-be' kind of question.  Wouldn't it be awesome if you could walk up to an implementation and design document and have a tool that tells you where the implementation and the intended design differ.  That's what Progression enables.  In this first version (VS 2010) we're just scratching the surface.  We've got some amazing capabilities that we'll deliver in coming releases.

You should stay tuned to try out VS 2010 Beta2 in order to see if Progression (and a lot of other cool features) can help you with these kinds of questions.

I'll provide more details in the future.

If you have Beta1, Beta2 will be a significant improvement in performance and reliability.  Great stuff coming online.  Stay tuned.

Yes, the family and I are moving back to Seattle.  We spent almost 2 years in Honolulu and loved almost every minute of it.  Great experiences, nice weather, fabulous beaches, snorkeling.  I even learned to surf.  Ok, well, I took a lesson in Waikiki.

But alas, it was time for wife and children to get back to some friends we haven't seen in a long time.  Life in paradise has a price and finding a place where the dollar stretched further was high on our list to accomplish.

I miss myHawaii friends, but am happy to be facing a new chapter in life.  Did I mention that it snowed in Seattle yesterday?  I miss the good Hawaii weather a little too.

As for work...

The Progression team is hard at work stabilizing the Rosario release for Beta 1.  We can't wait to get feedback on this really cool release of Visual Studio and Visual Studio Team System.

Stay tuned for more on Beta1 soon....

Aloha,

Allen

A longer article contains a link to a better image.

All week this week you can check out the Channel 9 coverage of the recent VS 2010 information at https://channel9.msdn.com/posts/VisualStudio/Visual-Studio-Team-System-2010-Week-on-Channel-9.  Tomorrow is 'Architecture Day' with Cameron Skinner.  Don't miss it!

I'll certainly be sharing more details as I can, but remember that PDC 2008 is the place to go for all the good details first, including Hand-on-labs with running bits, keynotes and lectures with juicy details and demo's in the pavillion including folks from the development team you can chat with.  (I won't be there this year, but look for some folks standing in for me in the VS Team System area.)

The week was chock full of meetings to plan out the next few months.  It's hard to feel productive when it's just all talk.  I'd rather be writing code, fixing bugs.  But the product plan is nice to have and I can't wait to tell you more soon.  Stay tuned after PDC for more on this blog about what I've been working on.

On a personal note, I completed the Basic Keelboat sailing certification course.  I'm now certified to take a small boat daysailing.  Can't wait to do that.  The only problem is that Oahu doesn't have boats for rent to the general public.  Plenty of Yacht clubs for boat owners and plenty of charters for large boats (crewed mostly - not a lot of bareboat activity in Hawaii), but nothing in the 20-26' range that I can take out for a few hours.  I'll keep looking though.