TFS/VSTS Orcas Beta-1 Feedback
General Summary
I have been working with Beta-1 since April, when I used beta-1 before it was released during the TFS BPA sabbatical. This is my first consolidated feedback report of the Orcas software ... all comments are my personal impressions and comments!
- Stability ... to date I have had one meltdown issue with the debugger and some instability around performance session comparisons, otherwise the Beta-1 release has proven rock-solid for what I am doing.
- Conversion wizard ... converts previous solutions effortless, including solutions containing a mix of managed and unmanaged code.
IDE Debugger Lab ... within Orcas
We developed an extensive lab demonstrating coding, debugging, code analysis and performance analysis of solutions in Visual Studio. Using the identical lab manual and code base, I came to the following conclusions:
- Code Analysis
- No issues here ... developers will continue to get the same fright looking at all the warnings. Most, however, are worth investigating, especially around performance and security.
- Class Modeling
- If only one could right click a solution , select class model and generate a class model for an entire solution.
- Code Coverage
- No issues here ... same code coverage benefits as seen from previous versions.
- Code Metrics (NEW FEATURE)
- This is a new feature ... select solution or project, right click and select "Code Metrics.
- The result is a code analysis of all managed code ... would be nice to see unmanaged code included ... which gives the technical stakeholders of the solution an in-sight into the "maintainability" of the solution.
- What does it mean?
- Maintainability Index – An index value between 0 and 100 representing the maintainability of the code. High is good, low is bad.
- Cyclomatic Complexity – Measurement of the structural complexity of the code, created by calculating the number of different code paths in the flow of the program. High implies that more tests are needed to achieve good code coverage and will likely be less maintainable.
- Depth of Inheritance – Number of class definitions that extend to the root of the class hierarchy. Deep hierarchies indicate more difficult and less maintainable code.
- Class Coupling – Good maintainable software strives for tight cohesion and low coupling, hence low is good. This stats is measured through the coupling to unique classes through parameters, local variables, return types, method calls, generic or template instantiations, base classes, interface implementations, fields defined on external types, and attribute decoration.
- Lines of Code – Indicates the approximate number of IL lines of code. High counts could indicate that methods are hard to maintain.
- What is interesting to see is that the Microsoft base code is included in the code analysis and in some cases I was scratching my head as to why certain results were as they were ... in some cases indicating complexity and low maintainability.
- Profiling (ENHANCED FEATURE)
- At a first glance the performance information is as overwhelming as ever, BUT, the reports shows a more consolidated view and for those of us wanting to determine whether code changes have made a difference, the comparison of performance session is a "cool" and productive feature.
- When working with the comparison report, the export options available in the individual performance views are dearly missed!
TFS ... on which "possible" feature improvements should we keep an eye on?
In discussions with the Orcas release for TFS is often referred to as minor release. It is, however, important that we summarize the improvements ... which are everything but minor ... as currently defined by the Orcas release:
- Continuous Integration and Build Improvements
- Multi-threaded builds with the new MSBuild.
- Build queuing and queue management
- Drop management ... policies used to define when builds are automatically deleted
- Build trigger configuration, i.e. build on checkin, rolling build, ...
- Improved abilities to
- specify what source, versions of source, etc to include in a build.
- manage multiple build machines.
- specify what tests get run as part of a build
- Version Control Improvements
- Destroy ... ability to manage and destroy items from the version control system to reduce disk usage.
- Annotate ... allows developers to inspect a source code file and see at line-by-line level of detail who last changed each section of code.
- Folder Diff ... compare operations on folders, which is useful when identifying differences between branches, local file changes and historical file changes.
- Get Latest on Checkout ... force Team Foundation Server to always download the latest version of a file when you check it out.
- Workspace mapping enhancements improve flexibility in client mappings and simplicity in definition, i.e. support mapping a folder or file under a cloaked folder and wildcard mappings so that you can map all files in a folder without mapping sub folders.
- Performance improvements
- Scale improvements
- Data Warehouse Improvements
- Sync large groups (>30K users) to improve handling of large groups of users
- SQL named instances to share a SQL server between multiple SQL instance
- Support for alternative websites and ports to conform with enterprise policies
- Support for client certificates
- SharePoint 2007
- Support for WSS2007
- Use of a separate SharePoint farm
Conclusion
- Support for existing features and look and feel q;-) happy
- Stability q;-) happy
- Support for unmanaged code (the new features) q;-| pondering
- New features and enhancements
- Code Analysis q;-) q;-) very happy
- Profiling q;-) q;-) very happy
- TFS ... new features q;-) happy