A Baker's Dozen of New Features in Orcas

There is nothing like having a new version of Visual Studio to play around with :) Not that Visual Studio 2005 is all that old, but the March CTP of Orcas was just released. I picked up the VPC version last night and gave it a whirl.

So far it looks great! I was expecting a very small upgrade to VS 2005, but there are some really substantial features here.

Here are a few features that caught my eye in no particular order.

Code Metrics

This is going to be really handy. Underneath the covers, VSTS was using code metrics like cyclomatic complexity to evaluate some of the code analysis rules.

It looks like in Orcas this functionality has been exposed directly. Hopefully we can use this feature in a check-in policy; I didn't see that option in this build, but maybe in a future one?

Annotation View for Files under Version Control

We've seen this in the Team Foundation Server PowerToy already, but it is nice to see it as part of the product. This feature is similiar to the 'blame' feature in Subversion; it gives you a chance to see who made what changes to a file. Really nice stuff! Hopefully this view will be extensible - I would love to incorporate the ability to right-click on a person in the annotation view and send an IM or schedule a meeting.

Team Foundation Server Build Definition Editor

 

No more dirty XML editing!  This is a great feature for anyone who has ever waded through a Team Build definition file. There are all kinds of nice new features added to Team Build, this is just one of them.

Build Retention Policy

One of the settings in the Build Definition is the ability to decide what you want to keep, and how much of it. This is handy if you're doing nightly builds. Chances are you are going to want to do some regular clean up. This retention policy will help you do that.

Continuous Builds!

I'm sure this will incite a massive cheer! You can decide when to start a build automatically - most notably you can do it when a check-in occurs; a continous build in other words.

Getting this feature in is a great example of how the product team is listening to its customers.

Build Queues

Not as sexy as Continuous Build, but still pretty cool; now you can queue up builds to run. Team Build is starting to look like a real full-featured release system now.

Folder Differencing!

This was in the Team Foundation Server PowerToy too I believe, but I didn't have a chance to try it out over there.

This is really something - you can do a folder-based comparison, which is particularly useful if you want to see differences between branches at a more granular level than just change sets.

Runtime Control of a Performance Session

 

Ah, last but certainly not least, improvements to the Performance Tools! This is a nice one, you can control your performance session as it runs - particularly useful is the ability to insert marks during the course of a performance run. These really help you when it comes time to do the analysis!

Query View in Performance Reports

Fantastic! It's so hard and tedious to sort through Performance Reports. You can dump them out to Excel and filter, but then you lose the nice visualizations. But, with a Query View you can structure a query to sort through the data, and still take advantage of the nice visualizations.

New Views in the Performance Reports

Some promising new views in the Performance Tools. I couldn't get the ETW view to work, but if we finally have a visualization for them, that's big. ETW events are super informative but very under utilized. This article has a nice summary and links to more information about ETW.

Integration with Work Item Tracking

Right-click and create a bug, what more is there to say :)

Performance Report Comparison

Being a former Program Manager on this team, it nearly brings a tear to my eye to see this nice feature :) Performance reports are so hard to work with because they gather so much data. It is nearly impossible to tell whether your current run was better than the last.

But, all that is changed with this view - you can compare the results of two performance files and get back a categorized report of the differences. Truly a great solution to a tough scenario, great job guys!