November Rosario CTP now available!

I'm happy to announce that the next Community Technology Preview of Rosario (officially known as Microsoft® Visual Studio® Team System code name “Rosario” November 2007 CTP) is now available.  Customers can immediately begin downloading the VPC images from our download page.  Because of the size of the VPC, I'd recommend using a download manager, such as the one referred to here, to download the following seven parts of this release:

For this release we worked on a number of key scenarios that we'd like you to try out.  To help facilitate your evaluation, we've included samples and walkthroughs within the VPC to demonstrate these new features.  Here's a list of walkthroughs broken out by product:

Architecture Edition

  • Visualizing Interaction Sequences between Service-Oriented applications
  • Using the Distributed System Designers and the Web Service Software Factory to build WCF applications
  • Designing and Visualizing Interactions between classes

Development Edition

  • Simplify Code Analysis rule selection with Rule Sets
  • Find and fix a bug using the historical debugger
  • Identify the test impact of code changes
  • Find a bug on a separate machine using the standalone debugger

Test Edition

  • Planning a testing effort
  • Executing manual test cases

Team Foundation Server

  • Managing user stories with the Agile Process
  • Managing features with the CMMI Process

In addition, we've included support to build setup packages with Windows Installer XML (WiX) technology.  You can learn more about that here and here

As with our previous Rosario CTP, this release is not a beta. We’ve done a reasonable amount of testing on the bits to ensure that most the major features work to some degree and that the key experiences listed above work well but have not done any of the configuration or deep testing that we do for a beta release that we expect customers to use on a regular basis. As such, we encourage you to take the release for a spin and evaluate the new features we’ve added but please don’t expect to use it for any sort of production usage and understand that any data that you enter into the system cannot be migrated to future releases. And by all means, any applications written with these bits may not be redistributed in any way.

We’re releasing this CTP primarily for two key reasons: practice shipping and collecting feedback. Over the past few weeks, we’ve gotten a lot of the first as we’ve worked out the kinks associated with building, testing and releasing these bits to you. Hopefully in the coming weeks and months, we’ll get a lot of the second from you. Feedback in the form of bugs and suggestions can be submitted via https://connect.microsoft.com/visualstudio. Make sure when you submit issues through Connect that you indicate the product version as being “Visual Studio Team System Code Name “Rosario” (November 2007 CTP)”. That will ensure it gets to the right folks for consideration. If you have a question or would like provide feedback to the product team, we’ve created a special forum specifically focused on Rosario: https://forums.microsoft.com/MSDN/ShowForum.aspx?ForumID=1736&SiteID=1. We look forward to hearing from you.

Finally, we have refreshed our page on MSDN focused entirely on Rosario. On it we’ll have links to the latest downloads, blog articles, documentation and other key information. I’d suggest bookmarking this site and returning regularly to keep up on the latest for the release.

Please join me in congratulating the Team System team on this release. It’s exciting to me that even in the face of significant effort on the recent release of Visual Studio 2008 that we’ve been able to make impressive progress in these important areas. I hope you agree...please take a look and let us know what you think.

Woohoo!

jeff