Visual Studio Team System Announced!

[Okay, I'm way, way behind and only starting to slowly unbury]

Remember when I said in this post:
“I think you can only really start to understand the scope of everything that Microsoft will be offering in Visual Studio 2005 by Beta 1. Until then, your basically looking at a car in an assembly line saying how you need the comfortable seat now, but we haven't welded doors on the car yet, we haven't done safety tests, and there's no turbo fuel injection (PS: you'll love the sunroof). To the specific point about Yukon delaying Visual Studio, I can assure you that the developer division isn't just sitting around waiting for Yukon to be ready, there is plenty of work to do, I just can't tell you about it until Beta 1“

At TechEd US we officially announced Visual Studio Team System and Team Foundation. Microsoft developer tools finally enter the lifecycle tools :

  • Enterprise Source Control (where Enterprise != SourceSafe),
  • Enterprise Web application stress tool (where Enterprise != Application Center Test)
  • Static analysis tools like FxCop rules, and PreFast for buffer overruns and other best practices for performance and security
  • Visual modeling applications using “Whitehorse“ and visually designing classes using Class Designer
  • Unit Testing, Unit Testing, Unit Testing!
  • Code Coverage Tools
  • Performance Analysis wizards
  • Integrated Project management tools - Whether your Project management tool is Excel or Microsoft Project Server
  • Process modeling
  • Fully extensible Framework

The real key is that everything works together. For example, creating a project from Portfolio Explorer automatically spawns creating a source code repository a SharePoint site and all the artifacts inside a project template (specs, code templates, etc). Or imagine a developer who checks in her code and before any code is officially checked in, unit tests and FxCop rules are run on the code before adding to the source tree. Once added in, a Project plan is automatically updated and a project manager instantly has an updated view of the progress of a project. Huge!

Check out the official site at: https://msdn.microsoft.com/vstudio/teamsystem. Chris Sells also has some good links on VSTS.

PS - I hope you're starting to see the reasons why Visual Studio 2005 won't release until 2005 :) We're still not done, there are still other things I can't talk about Beta 1, and some WOW things that I can't talk about Beta 2. Keep the faith and give us your feedback as lots of the Team System features are in the May Community Tech Preview.