I’m rationing myself to only a few sessions a day at TechEd. This is to avoid over stimulation and brain meltdown. So today I only went to three. They were all in a sequence and all about Visual Studio. They amplified what was said in the keynote yesterday in a totally good way. It is going to be a very powerful tool. I was lucky enough to be at a TechEd last year, when .NET was really gaining ground. I get the impression that the tool generators are now getting in on the act and starting to find out all the good stuff that .NET lets you do. If you throw things like web services, security and managed code at into the tool building mix you are going to get stuff which is seriously interesting.

Visual Studio is seriously interesting. It takes the development process and wraps itself around it like a large, friendly bear. Just about every aspect of doing the job properly is covered by the technology. Want to manage the distribution of the work, changes to the spec, oversee code testing, analyse the test results and even monitor performance under stress? You can. Want to draw diagrams based on live code, or better yet, high level system components? You can. Want to use your own particular development cycle? You can. This is terrific stuff. What we were shown didn’t all work. And some of it was a bit slow. But I get the feeling that it is all going to come together at the end.

As an educator this is highly interesting. I reckon that, to do justice to this technology, we are going to have to make quite a few changes to what we teach and how we teach it. I’d love to create a “teaching” development methodology which could be used by a team of students to learn how (or more interestingly) how not to build systems.

The roadmap shows a follow on product from Visual Studio 2005 which is presently codenamed Orcas. I’ve no idea what on earth that will do for us. But I’m really looking forward to finding out. If you are in the business you should get hold of this stuff and play with it. Now would be a good time.