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Last thursday we had our Northern “MSDN-Technet” briefings. A day of sessions for developers and IT-pros, organized by MS and a good place to meet fellow developers. Some things had changed. The event used to be decorated with political hyper-correct banners bearing portraits of afro-asian-caucasian people in conversation. The new banners just bear the letters TechNet. In blue. In the the corner is MSDN. Also in blue and small. Mmmm. Also new was the raffle. The good thing about that was that is keeps people at the spot to see what they won and induces social interaction. Prizes included a ticket for TechEd and a smartphone. I won a workgroup edition of Operations Manager. Don’t know yet what I’m going to do with it, it’s in MSDN and so far I never felt like installing it. But winning something feels good.

The highlight in the presentations was one on Team System by Arie Leeuwesteijn. Walking in I thought: “not again” but the talk very quickly evolved into a good discussion. Arie quickly gave an overview of the many parts of the product. Team System will come in three versions: Architect, Developer and Test. Most of the tools are found in several versions, the developer edition has the most. One of these is the class designer.

This was (imho) the most interesting partof the discussion. An idea is to have the architect design the classes and their public interfaces after which the developer will write the implementation. The model of a class is the source-code itself. The only thing added by the editor is some graphical information how the diagram is drawn. So when a developer is coding (s)he is actullay working in the design itself. To me this is good. In one of my recent nightmares a huge pile of paper is thrown over the fence and I am supposed to turn that into a working system. Usually the paperwork needs improvement and after a short span of time the work done by the architect and the actual implementation are far out of sync. With team system coding can change the model. To lock the model in team system you have to use source-safe. Any project with more than one person working on it which does not use sourcesafe will lead to (at least) frustration. Rules should prevent checking in code (=design) you’re not allowed to change. I like this approach very much, usualy I am in the luck of being both architect and developer. Now I can work on both aspects of the app at the same moment. And when it comes to working with another person TS can really help. But it does require mutual trust.

Designing an application requires more than drawing class diagrams. This is where the 3d party jumps in. For instance, Borland is working on Caliber a tool to manage system requirments. Borland and Delphi was another part of the discussion. Please, please give me a Object pascal add-in for Visual Studio. I should try Delphi 2005, but the IDE frightens me; the only thing I’m really interested in is the language.