Yesterday (That’s Dec 5, 2007 for those of you who will read this sometime in the future), Microsoft’s Live Labs announced/released a technology preview of what they call “Volta“.
From their FAQ, they describe Volta as:
an experimental developer toolset that allows developers to build standards-conformant, multi-tier web applications using established .NET languages, libraries and development tools. Via declarative tier-splitting, developers architect their applications as a single-tier application, then make decisions about moving logic to other tiers late in the development process- letting the complier manage creating boilerplate code such as communication between tiers. The programmer can still debug and test the application, much as if it were still on the client-tier, because Volta’s tier-splitting is deeply integrated with Visual Studio 2008 and the .NET Framework 3.5. In summary, Volta extends the .NET platform to distributed software+services applications, by using existing and familiar libraries, languages, tools, and techniques.
From the technical babble, Volta does sound pretty interesting.
I would of loved to play around with it a bit and post some screen shots/code samples, however I don’t have the required Visual Studio 2008 and .Net 3.5 installed. When I do, which hopefully will be in the next day or so, I’ll try to write a post with my thoughts and findings.
For those of you who like pretty pictures, here’s one of the Architecture Refactoring:
Volta is generating a little discussion among the ALT.NET community, mostly over concerns that with it we have Yet Another Code Generator whose main focus is to split tiers with no effort, and potentially without concern as to an impedence mismatch between understanding layers vs. tiers.
Check out what Arnon Rotem Gal-Oz’s post on this:
http://www.rgoarchitects.com/nblog/2007/12/06/MicrosoftVoltaOhMyOhMy.aspx
CRC.