Visual Studio 2012–News (iPhone, Web Test Management, 260 Limit and more)

With Visual Studio 2012 and TFS 2012 we have a lot of new stuff for Developers, Testers, Managers customers and more, and this is not the end….

Microsoft continues to develop new features for 2012 version.

Test Case Management On The Web

Brian Harry - We’ve heard from a number of customers that in final acceptance testing, they don’t want to install anything on the test environment that’s not going to be in the production environment.  That’s understandable.  In our first update, we will be shipping a basic web based test case management and manual testing experience that will enable this scenario from a browser.  This won’t be in the first CTP but should appear in the next.

260 Character Path Limit

Some call this Microsoft “Achilles’ heel” but I’ll not do so far, this is with no doubt a very annoying bug that not once cause me to change and modify entire environments.

Brian Harry wrote that after “CTP 1” there will be a fix that will increase the 260 characters limit to 400 characters.

This will allow us more flexibility in Source Control usage.

Project Management Improvements

Brian Harry - Kanban support – You may have seen the new kanban feature we introduced on our cloud service recently.  In our first update, we’ll be bringing that and some additional improvements.  This will give you an even broader set of choices for managing your project.  You can use our Scrum based Agile Project Management tools, Kanban or Project and Project Server – or a combination of them.

iOS, iPhone and iPad Shapes

Microsoft released new icons and shapes for PowerPoint StoryBoarding tool available in Visual Studio 2012.

To use:

1. Download Packs:
   • iOS Icons
   • iPhone Shapes
   • iPad Shapes
2. Open PowerPoint.
3. Navigate to the Storyboarding tab.
4. Click the 'Import Shapes' button and select this file.
   Now your shapes will be imported into your Storyboard Shapes library for you to use.

Learn more about PowerPoint Storyboarding.

More Storyboard Shapes

Developer Productivity

Brian Harry - Code Map – Code Map is a super cool new feature in the architecture tools that allows me to incrementally build up an architecture/dependency diagram as I explore code.  It makes walking into an existing code base and exploring it WAY easier than it ever has been before.  You can incrementally lay out a diagram one element at a time (class, method, etc) as you explore the code.  You can “query” to expand the diagram – like adding all derived classes or all referencing methods, etc to incrementally understand the code dependencies.

Microsoft Visual Studio Team Foundation Server 2012 Power Tools

Download from here

You can read more at the following blogs:

• http://tfspreview.com/en-us/home/news/
• Brian Harry’s blog