Whitehorse in Whidbey

Enterprise Development and Life-Cycle Support

Satisfying the application development needs of today's large-scale enterprises frequently requires complex, highly specialized sets of tools, technologies, and design methods. To address these needs, Microsoft will work with its life-cycle tools partners to deliver products with support for requirements gathering, software analysis and design, application construction, configuration and change management, application testing, and software deployment and operations. Together, Microsoft and its partners will offer teams of enterprise developers the features they need to quickly and efficiently complete mission-critical software projects.

In the Whidbey timeframe, enterprise architects, developers, and testers will benefit from new Visual Studio enterprise features designed to enrich the application development life cycle. Enterprise customers will gain a highly productive, tightly integrated suite of tools for project analysis and design, software configuration management, product build, and deployment.

Analysis and Design—"Design for Operations"

Once the requirements for the application are gathered, organizations often design a detailed architectural model for their solution. In addition, application architects must be able to reconcile their application designs with the logical infrastructure in which their solutions will be deployed. In effect, application architects must be able to design their solutions with the operations infrastructure in mind.

With Visual Studio Whidbey, Microsoft will deliver a set of tools (code-named "Whitehorse") that enable architects and developers to easily design service-oriented applications and operations infrastructure simultaneously. Whitehorse uses a drag-and-drop design surface to connect XML Web services, and then validates the resulting applications against the deployment environment. The designers will provide modeling support for describing applications and components, along with corresponding policy for security, protocols, and more (Figure 18).

Figure 18. The Web services designer will enable development organizations to complete applications to the original specification.

In offering a comprehensive Web services design tool, Visual Studio Whidbey will enable organizations to more effectively complete their applications on time and to the original specification. Moreover, rather than using complex and domain-specific modeling languages as an intermediary format for the application architecture, the design tools in Visual Studio Whidbey will provide coarse-grained abstractions from classes to components, Web services, assemblies, activities and processes, and maintain dynamic synchronization between the application model and the underlying source code.

When creating mission-critical software, application architects often find themselves communicating with their counterparts who manage data center operations. In the process of delivering a final solution, the application's logical design is often found to be at odds with the actual capabilities of the deployment environment. Typically, this communication breakdown results in lost productivity as architects and operations managers reconcile an application's capabilities with a data center's realities. In Visual Studio Whidbey, Microsoft will mitigate these differences by offering a logical infrastructure designer (Figure 19) that will enable operations managers to specify their logical infrastructure and architects to verify that their application will work within the specified deployment constraints.

Figure 19. The logical infrastructure designer will enable operations managers to specify infrastructure requirements.

In many cases, enterprise architects and developers will favor a more code-centric view of their solution. Visual Studio Whidbey will also include a rich class designer (Figure 20) so that even the largest software projects can be quickly understood and designed.

Figure 20. The class designer provides RAD design for enterprise-critical applications.

Microsoft's application design tools will enable architects, developers, and operations managers to participate in the envisioning phase of application development. As architects design their solutions using the Web services designer, operations managers can impose constraints using the logical infrastructure designer. Architects and developers can communicate easily using the application designer and class designer. Together, these tools enable teams to enjoy better communication and greater productivity.