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Introduction to Microsoft Visual Studio 2008 Tutorials

Welcome / Developer Challenges

Subtitles of the Movie

Now let's take a look at the challenges that the modern developer faces. Now, understand that as we look and talk about Visual Studio 2008 we are now trying to solve drastically different problems than what we used to, and developers are finding themselves kind of in a crunch because as technologies change and as the requirements of what we're trying to do with these technologies change it all kind of lands on the shoulders of the developer. So I want to show you just a real quick diagram here so that you'll get a visual image of what we're talking about with these changes, and notice on this diagram back in the good old days, right, when you had all these PCs out there and they were all connected and we wrote these cool little Desktop applications, and these computers just talked to each other, OK? Network connectivity, all of these instances of network connectivity here were very reliable, they were fast, they were local area networks, and then the coolest thing was everybody was in the same security context. We were in our local network, nobody could hurt us, you know, we just kind of programmed, and everything was cool. And then along came the Internet and a lot of things started to change. First of all, that comfortable little safe neighborhood, or that network that we worked in went away, and now to talk to other machines we had to go through the Internet. Or, we had to go through some kind of network that we may not have control over, OK, and so within the Internet right here once we bring our traffic into here we just lost control of it. We can no longer just safely assume that any time that we ask anything, when this computer tries to talk to this one and it has to go through the Internet to do it, we can no longer assume that that communication's going to be as fast as what we were used to in our local area networks. Something else we can't assume, we can't assume that we can even get to that computer right now. We may have network issues on the Internet, we may have network utilization issues that might be a lot slower than what we're expecting, and so, the good old days of just making a call to another computer and getting what you wanted out of it may be gone, right? So, what are we going to do now? We're going to have to program in what's called a Disconnected Environment. We're going to have to, a lot of times, use multiple threads because we're going to have to make a call out to this machine through the Internet but we're going to have to let our program right here continue to run and continue to process because we don't know how long this process down here might take, OK? And so, that's where we're getting into all kinds of things like web services, and asynchronous calls; keep in mind, out here in the Internet there could be a web server setting that we're connecting to the web server, getting information back, and then, based on what we got there we're trying to connect through the Internet to another machine, or we're trying to go down here. So you see what's happened? Our traffic, our network connections Ð none of that stuff can be assumed anymore. And then of course there's the next big thing, and that's this guy right here. That's our Security Context. Once we jump outside that box and head toward the Internet security becomes a major issue, and we're going to have to encrypt that data that's moving through the Internet, or we're going to have to go through some sort of login procedure so that people, we know who's coming in, we know who we're communicating with, and we know that our data hasn't been tampered with in the process of moving from there to here. So, just kind of think about that as we talk about some of the tools and some of the development challenges as we deal with Visual Studio 2008. This is exactly what you're dealing with. No longer are we in a safe world. All of our data and transmissions are now considered unsafe, and we're going to have to protect them; no longer can we consider that the other side is necessarily there and just waiting on us to respond right now; and no longer can we consider or just take for granted that the traffic across the networks that we're dealing with is going to be as fast or reliable as they used to be. So, all bets are off. There's a new paradigm and we haven't even gotten into the disconnected aspects of people disconnecting data onto laptops and hand-helds, and leaving our network and then coming back later. So, as you can see the life of the developer has gotten considerably more complex and as a result the tools that we have to use to develop these apps have gotten more complex as well, and you'll see that in Visual Studio 2008. Just wanted to help you kind of get your head around it as we head in that direction.

Tutorial Information

Course: Introduction to Microsoft Visual Studio 2008
Author: Mark Long
SKU: 34008
ISBN: 1-935320-54-8
Release Date: 2009-06-26
Duration: 7 hrs / 72 lessons
Captions: Available on CD and Online University
Compatibility: Vista/XP/2000, OS X, Linux
QuickTime 7, Flash 8

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