"Bottom-up" Design with Visual Studio Team System 2010 Architect (Channel 9)

Suhail Dutta, a program manager on the Visual Studio Team System Architect team, gives us a demonstration of the "bottom-up" design approach which will be possible with the Visual Studio Team System 2010 Architect product.

With "bottom-up" design, you can quickly reverse engineer an existing code base to construct models and examine relationships between pieces of code. Suhail also shows off some of the new UML designers coming in Visual Studio Team System 2010.

This "Humanized Screencast" is best viewed at fullscreen using the high-quality WMV download.

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Zeo Channel 9 :)

Sep 30, 2008 at 9:07 AM

Brian I love the video in screen!!! Awesome. Any chance you could give a hint into what tools you used to create this awesome screencast?
briankel

Sep 30, 2008 at 9:40 AM

Thanks, Zeo - glad you like it! I've got more in the same format coming this week and I think I'll be using this same format moving forward. I first saw Beth Massi use it on Channel 9 so this is just a slight evolution of her approach.

I will put together a blog post describing how these were filmed in detail since several people have asked. I'm still heads-down prepping some of the other great VSTS2010 videos we have coming online this week so please give me a few days to get that blog post together for you. Watch http://blogs.msdn.com/briankel for the post.
PerfectPhase "This is not war, this is pest control!" - Dalek to Cyberman

Sep 30, 2008 at 2:13 PM

Yes, these features look very handy
aL_ Kinect ftw

Sep 30, 2008 at 3:00 PM

i like the Picture in picture alot but i do have to say that letter boxig in any shape or form is really annoying and there doesnt seem to be any erason for it in the begining of the video

if i were to venture a guess as far as software goes, it looks like brian is using camtasia studio (correct me if im wrong though)
camtasia i pretty cool, it lets you record your session and then edit the recording, adding zoom-ins and stuff without loosing detail
briankel

Sep 30, 2008 at 4:00 PM

Hi aL_ -

You're right (as usual) about using Camtasia Studio. I'll post more details on my blog later. Glad you like the PiP format.

As for the "letterboxing" actually there's a good reason for it here. When dealing with video encoding you have to choose the best algorithm (framerate, frame quality, bitrate, etc.) for the content type you are encoding. For example, the best balance for encoding live action video may not work well for encoding desktop captures, and vice versa. For videos such as this, I believe that optimizing for the screen (so that you can see the demo clearly) is more important than optimizing for the live action video. I hope you'll agree.

Now when the video opens and closes, and we're not looking at a demo, I'm left with how to best encode the live action video. I could have shown it in a small box, but I think that's less personal of an "introduction" to the interviewees. I could have shown it full screen, but that would have resulted in a pretty jerky and blurry video. The reason I shrank it (not just letterboxed, it's also narrower as well) is that, as image size goes up, image quality goes down when all else is equal (e.g. bitrate). And since the quality of the live action video is already suffering due to the optimization for screen encodings, I sought to strike a balance.

Sorry you don't like it, but hopefully now you understand the reasoning behind the approach. I welcome your ideas on how to improve the quality in the future. If only somebody would invent a video format that allowed you to use different encoding approaches for different sections of your video, in much the same way that somebody might slice-and-dice a Web site design to use different qualities and types of image compression. Now THAT would be sweet.

Brian Keller
bob53050

Oct 01, 2008 at 1:40 PM

Wow great demo with the bottom up scenario used to track down problems

Thanks for the great work

Bob Hanson
Dark_Halmut

Oct 02, 2008 at 8:42 PM

This downloaded screen cast wont play in wmp on vista. Runs ok in VLC player though. Don't know whats up.

edit: Disregard, I blue screened and when I came back up wmp could play the video.
ericmatz

Oct 07, 2008 at 8:30 PM

I loves me some VSTS! I can't tell you how many times in my consulting career that I've had to analyze and fix an application that has absolutely no documentation. Even in cases where there is documentation, it's rarely in sync with what the code is doing today. Being able to reverse engineer the app and visualize it will make life so much easier in these cases.

But I have to point out the problem I see with the hypothetical scenario that Suhail uses. As a "new developer getting started", what happens when my boss says "Welcome to the team! Here's your new PC with Visual Studio Team Edition for Developers. Now fix that bug!" ?? I guess my question is (since not everyone is as fortunate as me to have Team Suite)...how much of this architecture goodness is going to make it into the Developer Edition?

Looking forward to the next CTP!
briankel

Oct 08, 2008 at 4:18 PM

Hi Eric - thanks for the kind words, I love the enthusiasm!
Your scenario is an important one and one that the team is working on. The current plan is that the diagrams you can produce with VSTS 2010 Architect will be easily shareable by somebody who does own the Architect or Team Suite SKU for others to view, but that unless you own Architect you'll be unable to manipulate the diagrams.

Brian Keller
Cesar

May 23, 2009 at 2:53 AM

Hi!,

I'm testing VSTS Beta1 (Build 20506.01), and it seems it does not have the menu options you show to generate classes and methods from SEQUENCE DIAGRAMS. Did we drop it from current Beta1?