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Software I am excited about |
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Location: Blogs barton's aggregated blogbarton's business and technical blog |
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| Posted by: barton |
6/1/2009 |
Microsoft recently released for download beta 1 of Visual
Studio Team System 2010 and .NET
4.0. There are many new features and lots of improvements,
and I have only just started to explore. Many of the capabilities,
however useful, are not usable since this is a beta product and will
not be RTM for several months. However, there are a couple of gems I've
already uncovered that are available for Visual Studio 2008 - so you
don't have to wait to use them.
The first is PEX.
It is smart analyzer for your methods that generates parameters and will generate unit tests for your code based on that analysis. This tool will really help developers write more useful unit tests quickly.
The second is Contracts,
an extension to the .NET framework that provides pre-conditions, post-conditions, and object invariants (if you have worked with Eiffel,
the "design by contract" approach will be familiar). Contracts extends both static and runtime checking capabilities in very powerful ways that help programmers ensure that the code they write is
used as intended.
There is theme emerging here in this wave of technology from Microsoft. .NET has matured now to the state where it is taking on aspects of almost every known language (in .NET 4.0 there is a LISP-like functional language called F#
and the DynamicLanguageRuntime is enabling languages like Python to be supported). .NET continues to be a convergence point that takes the best qualities of languages and aligns them to the capabilities of the underlying framework and tooling found in the Visual Studio IDE and Team Foundation Server.
Then there is Google's Waves,
the application that redesigns and leverages what we've learned about email, instant messaging, and collaboration in the last 20-odd years and presents a single integrated application that adjusts how messages are delivered based on the contexts of the users involved.
The only other technology innovation that is catching my interest is Stephen Wolfram's new web-based Mathematica-cum-Natural language query engine. WolframAlpha is definitely a new kind of application and I see a bright future for it.
There certainly is no shortage of interesting and helpful new ideas out there, and all of this makes me feel very positive about where we can go from here.
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