I'm attending TechEd EMEA 2008 and day one is now complete. My role in Charteris has now changed to encompass a much wider technical role so these posts from Barcelona will encompass a wider range of  topic.

Day one of TechEd kicked off with a keynote given by Jason Zander, General Manager, Visual Studio Team. He focused almost exclusively on the new features of Visual Studio 2010, many which had been previously unannounced. The emphasis was on making many tasks easier and more productive. Key features included:

• Improved code visualization and comprehension tools

• Code history tracking and replay mechanisms to eliminate the so-called "no-repro" issue.

• Test Lab Management tools

• Better built-in Sharepoint development tools and explorer technologies

• Multi-Processor support for managed and unmanaged code.

• Flexible configuration control for easy transformation of configuration values across environments.

• Full WCF and WF project templates.

David Myers has covered the "no-repro" issues extensively on his blog on this site so I can't add too much new to this. Instead one of the other most significant features for me was the code visualization and comprehension tools. One of the key challenges of many enterprise scale projects I have worked on,  has been how to bring additional developers on to a project and allow them to understand the existing code in a short time period.

Visual Studio 2010 addresses these needs by providing tools to dynamically generate diagrams that map the references and interlinkages between code assemblies. Additional tools also the automatic generation of UML 2.1 sequence diagrams for code methods and functions. In my view these can be really powerful tools to quickly document existing development artefacts and allow the flow of applications to be more easily understood. They can easily adjust to the dynamic nature of software.

There is still a long timeframe until we see the final software releases, but hopefully these features should be a significant aid to developers.

This was followed by a really good presentation by Miha Kralj, a Microsoft Architect. In a really pragmatic, entertaining session he covered many of the common architectural "anti-patterns" that cause so many software projects to falter. For each anti-pattern there was a relevant case study and practical steps to reduce the relevant risk. Towards the end of a session was interesting of code Whilst not totally radical in nature it encapsulated so much implicit good practice in one session, by detailing the bad practice, that it was a valuable for both developers and architects alike.