Software Made Simple

REALbasic

In January, REAL Software released REALbasic 2006, which added several new features to REALbasic, including language enhancements and IDE enhancements. Most notable for me is the ability to have shared (aka static) methods on classes. I also think the new ability to script the IDE will be quite useful.

I haven’t had a chance to play around with RB 2006 a lot yet, but I have verified that UltraToolBar and RBUnit work with it on all platforms (Mac OS X, Windows XP, SUSE Linux 9.2).

Visual Studio

Lately much of my time has been spent in Microsoft Visual Studio .NET 2003. In addition, I’ve been spending some time evaluating Visual Studio 2005 Team System and I like what I see.

I attended a presentation of VS 2005 Team System at our local .NET users group last month. I was fortunate to win one of the door prizes: my own copy of Visual Studio 2005 Professional. This gave me a bit more incentive to play around with it and investigate Team System as well.

But first, a little background.

Microsoft has completely revamped their development tools. Think of it as Visual Studio Everywhere. There are now many different “editions” of Visual Studio:

Visual Studio Express

There are separate Express editions for developing Visual Basic Windows applications, C# Windows applications and ASP.NET web applications. Until the end of 2006, each of these can be freely downloaded from Microsoft.

Visual Studio Standard

This edition contains everything in the Express editions, plus a Class Designer and source control support.

Visual Studio Professional

This is the version I won. It contains everything in the Standard edition plus XML/XSLT support and better support for working with local and remote databases.

Visual Studio Tools for Office

This appears to be similar to Visual Studio Professional but with the ability to develop Office extensions.

Visual Studio Team System

This is the edition that can communicate with Team Foundation Server (TFS, which I’ll explain in a moment). This edition is also available as Team Edition for Software Architects, Team Edition for Software Developers, Team Edition for Software Testers and Team System which includes all features of the other 3 editions.

The purpose of Team System is to work with TFS to provide integrated team-based development. In addition to what is in Visual Studio Professional, it adds Code Analysis, Static Analysis and Unit Testing.

For more details check out the chart at Microsoft MSDN that compares them all.

By my count, that is a total of 10 different versions of Visual Studio!

Team Foundation Server

This is yet another product that is used in conjunction with Visual Studio to support integrated team-based development. It includes built-in source control, an automated build system, work item tracking, and a web portal to tie it wall together.

TFS is not for the faint of heart and may just be overkill for teams of less than 5 people.

TFS also comes with Team Explorer, which is a lightweight version of Visual Studio that provides access to all the TFS features. I guess that makes 11 versions of Visual Studio.

I’ve also decided I should be checking out MonoDevelop on Linux.

I’ll have more to blog about all this soon.