TechEd 2007: Health Modeling Tool for Visual Studio 'Re-Premieres'

ORLANDO - Every so often, new products or tools from Microsoft that aren't always "front burner" projects have to be re-announced...and sometimes, even some big news doesn't find a proper place in the cycle. (We've been tripped up by this before ourselves.) This afternoon at TechEd, Microsoft architect evangelist "Chef" David Aiken (complete with white uniform) demonstrated a component called Visual Studio Management Model Designer. He described it as an essential component of .NET Framework 3.0 development, and it is downloadable from Microsoft's CodePlex, though it is probably as official a .NET component at this point as PowerShell was a component of Longhorn as of last year.

The concept of this component is to enable developers to automatically generate code that enables the reporting of their own health and status, based on standards in the midst of being set for Windows. Within a few minutes, applications become capable of producing their own text logs - an essential part of development that is often missed for the sake of compressing the schedule.

VSMDD is a snap-in for Visual Studio that examines the key objects already used within an application's source code, and enables the developer to model the interactions for those objects to determine the best time and context for the generation of "health events." As Windows development in .NET and elsewhere evolves, health management using a Windows standard will become more important, especially as the operating system uses more restrictive policies for enabling misbehaving applications to continue. Such services may not know what "misbehavior" is in the context of your application, so this modeling tool gives you a framework (to coin a phrase) to build upon.

Developers can also use this tool to generate explicit "instrumentation," which are events and data similar to the kinds used in Windows Management Instrumentation. Conceivably, such instrumentation data could be used by PowerShell scripts to give administrators a way to take scripted actions based on the "heartbeats" such applications would provide.

Attendees asked when Microsoft would eventually release this component. Upon hearing the murmurs, Aiken happily responded the date would be sometime in March. As it turns out, he meant last March, adding that this is not a beta, not an alpha, not a CTP. Whether it is or may become a part of .NET 3.0 officially is yet to be seen.