Posted on by Bizmonger

Reimagining Software Development through HoloLens

Introduction

We are beginning a new era of user-experiences that will soon be introduced to us via augmented reality. This technology can introduce a new perspective of the tooling that can be leveraged to design and build the software systems of the future. Specifically, the software industry can now collaborate on how to design the future user-experience of building software systems through augmented reality.

This article will be the first of several articles that detail the possibilities of future software development.

Areas of Enhancement

Instead of common software development involving a keyboard and a dual-monitor setup, imagine building software with just a keyboard and HoloLens. In addition, imagine your future IDE as a development environment that enables software development and maintenance at various levels of abstraction. For example, what if developers had an architectural view of their code and were able to drill-in to a specific layer of their architecture’s abstraction by selecting a layer (i.e. UI) to view its modules or by zooming out of that particular abstraction all while using their augmented reality headset.

Here’s another example. What if a developer could place various panels (i.e. Test Explorer, Output Window, CodeMap, and CallStack) at different depths of their view or dock them to different corners of their view relative to their text editor. Again, using augmented reality, a developer can zoom in and out from their IDE’s range of views. A developer can also look to the left, right, up, and down to interact with other sets of tools and data (i.e. windows for debugging) as they pertain to the IDE’s text editor.

In short, there are several areas within the user-experience of building software that can be redesigned. The areas that this series will discuss are Notifications, UI Module Placement, and Development Views.

The following is a summary of the areas that will be discussed in the upcoming series.

  • Notifications
    • Automated Tests
    • Work Items (defects, tasks)
  • UI Module Placement (docking)
    • Test Results
    • Output Window
    • Application runtime
    • Editors
      • Designer ( Blend)
      • Code (Visual Studio)
  • Development Views
    • Classic
      • Prior versions (Visual Studio)
    • Architectural
      • UI
      • Services
      • Model
      • DAL
    • System
      • Clients
      • Servers (Build, Database, Source Control)

Conclusion

In conclusion, we are beginning a new era of user-experiences that will soon be introduced to us via augmented reality. This technology can introduce a new perspective of the tooling that can be leveraged to design and build the software systems of the future. Specifically, the software industry can now collaborate on how to design the future user-experience of building software systems through the lens of augmented reality. The coming articles that this series will discuss will be Notifications, UI Module Placement, and Development Views.

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