Visual Studio Launch Event–Seattle

These are notes from the launch event day. The “take a drink” word of the day? Continuous.

General Stuff

• “Build, Measure, Learn,” is the new mantra.
• "The new WPF editor in VS is Blend in the background"

Brian Harry Said

• We need to make deployment part of the standard development lifecycle.
• Modern apps need a modern lifecycle
• Keeping quality high allows you to react quickly to your customer’s needs
• Get smaller chunks of value out more quickly and get feedback on each. Keep the loop going.
• We are now on a 3-week cadence to deliver value to Azure-hosted TFS.
• As we set out to build VS2012, we wanted to help developers get to production quickly. We examined the friction points in that flow.
• Every customers eyes are bigger than their development team’s stomachs.

Soma Said

• Our clients are demanding agility, agility, and more agility.
• More data will be generated in the next 5 years than has been generated in all history.
• I want you to remember 2 things when thinking about VS 2012.
  • Visual Studio 2012 is about continuous improvement for teams
  • Visual Studio 2012 is about new apps for modern platforms
• There have been >600,000 downloads of VS2012 in the last 4 weeks. This is fastest rate of pulling a new VS in the history of VS.
• VS 2012 Update 1 will release before the end of the year. A CTP of this update will be released later this month. We will continue delivering on  a regular cadence from then on.
• Expression Blend is now part of the Visual Studio family.
• Business agility means:
  • Continuous Feedback
  • Continuous Quality
  • Continuous Improvement
• The key for any feedback to be effective is ensuring the right people are engaged at the right moment.
• VS has a comprehensive set of test tools that allow continuous thinking about quality all the way through the software creation process.
• Every company is a software company.

Brian Summers – Senior IT Manager Columbia Sportswear

• Don’t think that TFS won’t help you if you live in a different development environment like Java. It will.
• VS/TFS allow s a Java developer to join a .NET team and there is no ramp-up time on tools. It just works.
• Now that we can deliver more frequently, IT is seen by the rest of the company as more valuable.

Jason Zander Said

• Our service offerings are shipping every 3 weeks, the length of our Sprints.
• Our internal teams are actually using all this stuff.
• Releasing so frequently means no rollbacks. We only roll forward now.