That Other Visual Studio Team Edition that Noone Likes to Talk About
Which one could that be you ask? Why, the Team Edition for Software Architects of course! It is one of the least discussed tools in the VSTS toolbelt but it really packs a whollop if you know how to use it. I was browsing through some blog postings and ran across a post on Rob Caron's blog site, citing an article written solely about the wonders of the Deployment Designer capabilities found within VSTA. Here is an exerpt...
Distributed System Designers
Visual Studio Team Edition for Software Architects gives architects, operations managers, and developers the ability to increase the predictability of success by visually constructing service-oriented solutions that can be validated against their operational environments prior to deployment. The tools used to achieve this objective are called the Distributed System Designers. They are a collection of four different designers: the Application Designer, System Designer, Logical Datacenter Designer, and the Deployment Designer. For more information on the designers, visit Overview of Distributed System Designers in the product documentation.
A key output of the Distributed System Designers is the Deployment Report. One purpose of the Deployment Report is to improve communication between Software Architects and Infrastructure Architects, and to increase the likelihood of a successful deployment. Another purpose of the Deployment Report is to automate a deployment; this is the key topic for the rest of this paper.
Technorati tags: Visual Studio Team System, VSTA