A: Whenever you talk to an organisation, it will first start talking about a set of business priorities. They want IT to be a strong enabler in fulflling those with a highly reliable, scalable and available infrastructure. People prematurely jump to the conclusion that it is all about a robust infrastructure and thus forget the role of developers who develop the business applications which fundamentally run the business. Companies today need a strong combination of developers and IT professionals to run an effective IT organisation, which in turn, will enable you to achieve the business priorities.  

Today, the biggest challenge facing any CIO is to understand the business priorities from his CEO, then translate them smartly into IT priorities and also create an IT organisation to deliver on those priorities. Secondly, the CIOs are always challenged with the finite resources available at hand to accomplish infinite amount of task to deliver against the business priorities. CIOs are always puzzled how to put their top resources to work on the top business priorities. Typically a CIO will have three distinct groups in his IT organisation – the project management group, which studies the business priorities and decides what applications to develop. Second is the development group, which builds these applications. Third is the operations group that creates an infrastructure, deploys these applications and maintains them. Unfortunately, each of these groups operates in silos. There exists a ‘Chinese Wall’ between these groups. Microsoft, with its unique capabilities, offers products targeted at various groups. We have products which are targeted at the project management, development and IT
operations groups. There is a choice of Project Server, VS on Team Foundation Server, and Systems Centre. If we can fgure out how these technologies can talk to each other and integrate seamlessly, it can help immensely rather than working in silos.

Visual Studio 2010 helps the IT organisations to get rid of ‘no repro’ (no duplication) scenario. It helps the developers and T pros connect in a seamless way so that they don’t do ‘back and forth’ for any sort of application debugging. Microsoft wants to create a deep level of integration between the Team Foundation Server and Project Server for exchanging information, interface better and understand how best they can work to address the business priorities.

A: Microsoft is embracing UML (Unifed Modelling Language) – the most widely used modelling language among software architects so that they are able to use their app skills in the VS 2010. In many organisations architects and developers are different set of people but in some they are the same. Microsoft has developed one set of code understanding tools for the architects to enable them from the stage of designing an application and all the way to the stage of deployment. VS 2010 is going to take away a lot of pain as its tools will run against the legacy infrastructure and help the architectures and developers alike in understanding the nuances and prepare for the future.

We want to provide end-to-end testing tools for the community starting from test case management, manual testing, functionality testing, stress testing, load testing, test case prioritisation etc. All these functionalities are embedded in the VS 2010. We are also working on something called Virtual Lab Management, which lets you create virtual test environment without bothering to create a physical one. All of the major Microsoft partners will be enabled to offer this service to the users.

A: The good news here is that CIO doesn’t need to worry at all because he doesn’t need to use the tool. They should just be bothered about aligning IT with the business priorities. But I would certainly advise the developers, architects and testers to seriously think about the entire application lifecycle management (ALM). They may be responsible for only a particular part of ALM but if you don’t think about the entire life cycle of an application the chances of getting a bad outcome are far more. One doesn’t need to create brouhaha about just their function.

A: I would like to refer to my earlier comment on business priorities and applications needed to fulfil them. ALM starts from the time when CIOs think about the business priorities. VS 2010 helps the developers and IT organisations from the initial stages of applications designing, to development – all the way to deployment. It effectively enables us in thinking about ALM from the day one.

A: Yes, it was a purpose-built exercise and the response was fantastic. Unlike previously, more than 50 partners are ready with their applications developed over VS 2010 at the time of the launch of the product. Jetbrains, a partner of Microsoft, has a fantastic tool which performs a bunch ‘refactoring’. Earlier Jetbrains would take a good 3-4 months to develop these tools after we announced the launch of Visual Studio. But today, their refactoring tool is ready along with the launch of VS 2010. It happened because we involved them from the day one. Second example is Microfocus, which was very keen on creating an extension to VS 2010 to enable COBOL developers to be able to use Visual Studio. Their solution is also ready today. This time we very proactively involved our key partners so that they can also launch their products and tools alongside us.

A: Microsoft has a vision to provide its users the platform technologies, software and a set of applications that will help companies envision a ‘connected experience’. Visual Studio 2010 and .Net 4 frameworks are the core technology pieces which will help make the vision come true. We are delivering on our promise to make the life of developers and architects easier.