Team System Highlights from Today's Whidbey Chat - Rick LaPlante's Q&A

Rick LaPlante (Expert):
Q: What kinds of additional support will VS 2005 have for schema-based web services design? Will xsd.exe be enhanced so that it handles a greater variety of schema designs?

A: inside of the VSTS Team Architect edition we have added a complete design experience for designing services using a WSDL first/schema approach. you can try out the feature (called the application designer) in the lastest VSTS CTP.

Rick LaPlante (Expert):
Q: What is the support for Continuous integration tools. Build will be MS BUILD? Unit testing?

A: VS Team System (Team Developer and Team Test editions) support creating unit tests (including the ability to code gen the signatures of your tests, running, and seeing the results of your unit tests inside the IDE. We also have built into Team Foundation Server a "Team Build" feature which is configurable to set the time between builds, currently its set to 24 hrs (nightly build scenario). There's an event model with the Team Foundation Server that you can use to get events when new checkins occor and can implement a continuous build model that way. I know the cruisecontrol folks at thoughtworks have looked at Team System and are figuring out how they want to integrate. we'd love to see cruisecontrol.net be able to use all of the tests you can create in Team System, etc.

Rick LaPlante (Expert):
Q: Will team system be released at the same time as vs 2005, or will there be a lag?

A: Same time, late summer. the integration work we've done requires that we get it all done together.

Rick LaPlante (Expert):
Q: Is PREfix still scheduled to be in the release of Whidbey?

A: Yes its going out as part of the Team System's Team Developer Edition.

Rick LaPlante (Expert):
Q: Is PREfix still scheduled to be in the release of Whidbey?

A: btw, I should have been more clear, we are shipping PREFast in Whidbey.

Rick LaPlante (Expert):
Q: What TDD tools will there be in VS2005?

A: We've added a few things to the VSTS product that we think will make doing test driven development much easier. First, we've integrated unit testing (the ability to create, run, see results from, organize/test case management, etc) into the product. Using this model, you can write the tests, then use the refactoring support to create the classes/methods you need to implement for the tests. i'm in europe right now and have demo'd this a couple of times. it works pretty well. we've also been talking w/ several TDD folks about creating a "test driven development" methodology template which would drive the way teams use the Team System to implement software projects in a TDD way.

Rick LaPlante (Expert):
Q: do you have guidance on teamsize where VSTS becomes practical?

A: From about 3 to 1000 is what we figure. Actually, the team system was designed to handle small teams using very agile methodologies as well as large teams using very formal methodologies such as CMMI level 3 type stuff by having a configurable process model. We think that any team that needs to increase the collaboration because of size, specialization, or location, will get a lot of value from it. We will continue to ship a much improved version of VSS in Whidbey as well for the small (2-5) person teams that don't want a server based SCM system and don't need the collab features. Still, those teams may very well want to pick up the role based skus for load testing, performance tuning, or SOA design.

Rick LaPlante (Expert):
Q: Will there be any tools in VSTS to assist in the customization of methodologies?

A: VSTS has an XML based methodology template for customizing the processes. in V1 we were able to get an XSD schema for the XML so that it loads nicely into the VS XML editor, but weren't able to finish in time a custom editor for it. We know of a couple partners who are building very powerful methodology editors as add ons for version 1.

Rick LaPlante (Expert):
Q: Will Team System require a separate Yukon server license, or will the database be covered under the VSTS license? Also, will Beta2 allow one-machine (VlPC) configuration for evaluation (I certainly wouldn't want to deploy that way).

A: VSTS will not require an additional Yukon license, it is included as an embedded version for use solely with the Team Foundation Server. and happily, YES beta 2 will install on a single machine both the data tier and the middle tier if that's the config you desire.

Rick LaPlante (Expert):
Q: With whidbey will there be a new source control tool?

A: Hi Halasz, yes VS2005 has a new enterprise scale configuration management system called the Team Foundation Server (and its part of the overall VSTS 2005 Team System). The TFS is a SQL database backed transactional config management system that is as easy to use as SourceSafe, but much more powerful, substantially faster (order 100x on slow modem lines) and completely reliable. my team of > 250 people have been using this source code control and config management system for about 8 months w/out any loss of data. You can find more info about the TFS at https://lab.msdn.microsoft.com/teamsystem. Hope this info helps. -Rick

Rick LaPlante (Expert):
Q: How do you envision changesets being utilized in VSTS and how do they figure into Team Build?

A: Changesets are the atomic checkin unit in the Team Foundation Server. We use those as the way to promote from different branches, we use them as the unit that can get associated with a work item, etc. they are certainly integrated with Team Build. Team Build nightly sync's the days changesets and starts a build with those changes. it produces a report of all the changesets that made it into the build, and all the work items that were related to those change sets (if any). pretty nice. BuckH on my team has a good blog with lots of info about changesets. you can find it at https://blogs.msdn.com/buckh

Rick LaPlante (Expert):
Q: What's the estimated ship date? Last time I saw, it was "first have of 2005" I think...

A: We've started working with the XNA team to take versions of the Team Foundation Server and customize the process (another use of our extensibility model) to work for game content production. We are also looking at what client side tools the game development community needs. I haven't seen the latest xdk so I'm not sure how much they got in, but the clear goal is to put all of the team system that is appropriate for game development into XNA Studio.

Rick LaPlante (Expert):
Q: What percentage of the market do you think will buy Team System? I could not get a straight answer at the author's summit. I need to know if it makes economic sense to spend any time on it in my book.

A: While we don't release our specific market projections VSTS is a major for us in terms of product strategy and we expect that we'll see a substantial portion of our licenses (where substantial is > 25% lets say) as one SKU or another of Team System products. Also, in terms of market, if we're talking about the existing enterprise tools market, then i think thats not the best measure. our goal with the team system is to substantially grow the market into professional dev teams that aren't using "enteprrise tools" today because of any combination of (price, usability, consulting costs to role out, etc). hope this provides a bit more of our thinking. -Rick

Rick LaPlante (Expert):
Q: Has there been a decision made on whether the unit testing tools will be included in the non-team system editions of vs2005?

A: Hi David, yes we spent some time looking at this based on customer feedback. In the end we weren't able to make it work into the schedule to pull the unit test work from the integrated Team System product line. we would have had to test in 2 place, 2 config, etc. We also looked at NUnit and felt that it was a fine solution if you aren't looking for the deep integration with the rest of the team system. I know that this will be very high on our list for v2 (getting unit testing into Pro). thanks for the question. -Rick