Professional Application Lifecycle Management with Visual Studio 2012

Chapter 17

Introduction to Software Development

What's In This Chapter?

• Application lifecycle management features of most interest to developers in Visual Studio 2012
• Learning how My Work surfaces the items you care most about
• Managing interruptions using suspend and resume
• Seeking peer feedback on your code using the new code review capabilities

Visual Studio originally came into popularity in the 1990s by providing individual developers with the tools they needed to build great software. Most applications in that timeframe were created by individuals or relatively small teams working at a common location. However, over the course of many years, organizations developed increasingly larger and more complex code bases. The code is typically edited by a number of developers from all over the world, and teams must embrace rapidly changing requirements in order to keep up with the pace of business opportunities.

Simply having the tools at your disposal to create applications as an individual developer is no longer enough. You need tools to help you to analyze large code bases, and to help you to identify hot spots that might be causing you problems. You need tools that will provide you with the confidence that not only does the application still work after making your changes, but that it is more efficient, and the quality of the code is improving as your team matures. This is where Visual Studio 2012 comes in.

Visual Studio 2012 is also very useful for new “green field” development, ...