Scott Hanselman

Hey, I was quoted in a 'Whitehorse' article on CNET that's mirrored at ZDNET.

Financial software maker Corillian, for example, said Microsoft's services-oriented approach with Whitehorse and the close synchronization between application models and the code that corresponds to them will yield higher-quality code and help development teams stick to an application's original design, said Corillian chief architect Scott Hanselman.

"You want to fix bugs in design. The closer you get to the go-live date, the more expensive a bug is," Hanselman said.

Whitehorse should also help developers create software more quickly, he said. The combination of the tool's Web services assembly approach and the prewritten chunks of code that Microsoft provides "gives me bigger and bigger Lego blocks than I've ever had to play with before," Hanselman said.

That's more or less what I said. :)  Of course, taken in snippets things like 'find and fix bugs early' sound cheesy to the trained ear, but it's still worth the saying.

I always thought the Visio integration into the Visual Studio.NET Design/Development process was a little iffy and it never really took off for me.  The project 'Whitehorse' will introduce a new series of graphical designers in Whidbey (the next version of Visual Studio.NET) with support for design and validation of Web Services-based systems.  The Toolbox will include a 'Visual Service Designer' that will include a whole series of visual representations of different services.  A conceptual service might be a Web Servuce, a Database, an ASP.NET Web App, etc.

I think they'll get it right this time.  Just a feeling.  A lot of good thought has been put into this feature, and with the emerging WS-I standards, and all the good thought around SOA, all the ingredients are here.

P.S. I can only imagine that the stuff the guys at Mindreef (makers of the SOAPScope product that you should buy) will cook up to integrate with these new designers. 

Be sure to check out the MSDN TV Episode featuring Whitehorse.

About Scott

Scott Hanselman is a former professor, former Chief Architect in finance, now speaker, consultant, father, diabetic, and Microsoft employee. He is a failed stand-up comic, a cornrower, and a book author.

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