Out of the gate...

Hi - I'm Bill Gibson, a senior program manager on the Whitehorse team. I want to use this blog to share some insights and observations from the world of Whitehorse. In case you missed it, Whitehorse is the internal project name for the Distributed System Designers in Visual Studio 2005, available in the Visual Studio Team Edition for Software Architects package. Now there's a mouthful ! For those on the team we'll always be Whitehorse...

As one of the Whitehorse architects, I have been focused particularly on application and system design. There's much we've achieved in the first release of these tools and still much to do. There are also lots of misconceptions about what the tools are for and how they should be used and can be extended. We obviously have not done a great job of explaining what an 'application' is or explaining why class libraries don't show up on the design surface, and I've yet to meet anyone who really gets the System Designer! I'll try and talk to these kinds of issues as well as exploring ideas we have for the future - at least those I can share publicly.

And just in case you're interested in my background... I like others on the team have a long history in model-based development tools. For anyone familiar with the Texas Instruments integrated CASE products -- known variously as IEF, Composer and more recently, COOL:Gen -- I was on the design team from 1985 to 1997 (!) working on both the modeling tools and the methodology that underpinned it. Much of the thinking from those days, particularly the work we did on component based development, still permeates our thinking today.

Comments

• Anonymous
  October 17, 2005
  Bill - welcome to the world of blogging!
  
  As someone with grey hair (yes I remember IEF), I have seen modeling tools come and go. In your opinion what makes this one any different? (To be clear I have not seen it yet, but I'm a little curious and wondering if I should spend time exploring it....)
  
  I thought we were coming close to UML, but David Anderson has made some comments that this too is starting to lose its luster...
• Anonymous
  October 20, 2005
  We're tackling things very differently these days. Back in the IEF days we were very focused on integration (we defined the 'i' in i-CASE). This focus spawned the IEF's incredible Encyclopedia and of course a string of failed repository projects that followed us. While IEF could be successful with a repository because it was entirely self contained, we now believe a more federated model is the way to go, involving many cross-refrenced smaller, nimbler domain-specific languages, each designed for their specific job, each which may have their own tools, guidance etc. Source control replaces the repository and model-management of the old days. The job of a tool suite like the Distributed System Designers is then to integrate these languages and tools in a seamless fashion.
  
  
  And while IEF was 100% focused on model-driven code generation, we now believe that we must accommodate bottom up (code-first) as well as top-down and middle out design; with both formal and agile processes. So we haven't recreated IEF, we've learned from those experiences and are applying some of those lessons and many new ideas in a more modern software engineering context. We not slaves to UML, that's for sure, but there's much of value in some of its techniques - our system designer leans heavily on ideas derived from the ROOM methodology now part of UML 2.
  
  So while we have only scratched the surface of what is possible here I think you'll find lots of interest on what we're doing. Take a look at the tools in the beta and let us know what you think. For more general info you can go to our web site at http://lab.msdn.microsoft.com/teamsystem/teamcenters/architect/default.aspx