Visual Studio, Modeling, and DSI

A new set of tools in Visual Studio Team System (VSTS) aims to minimize some obstacles to building and deploying IT applications by enabling developers to create graphical models of applications and the data centers they will be deployed in. The move marks Microsoft’s entry into modeling and is a first step in the company’s Dynamic Systems Initiative (DSI) to make software less expensive to deploy, manage, and monitor on an ongoing basis. However, Microsoft’s initial tools fall well short of their eventual goal, and the company’s approach to modeling differs substantially from that of competitors such as IBM.

The fundamental problem Microsoft hopes to solve with its modeling tools is ineffective communication among programmers, and between them and other parts of an organization. Typically, each development group may understand its own applications, but not the other applications that they must integrate with or how the data center is organized and configured. Once built, applications are often “thrown over the wall” to IT professionals with little or no documentation on their system requirements or how they should be configured. By helping developers create formalized descriptions of their applications, Microsoft hopes to provide a more effective mode of communication than informal documents (which quickly become out of date) or source code (which is difficult to read and communicate); in turn, this should reduce the time IT professionals spend tracking down configuration errors that cause application failures.