Visual Studio turns 10!

This year, the Visual Studio family is celebrating the 10 year anniversary of Visual Studio. Whenever you hit a major milestone, it’s worthwhile to reflect on the journey. Visual Studio has helped our developers, customers and partners to be successful in their businesses and create great applications – many of whom have been with Visual Studio for the full ten years.

When I look back over the past ten years at how Visual Studio has evolved, I’m very proud of what we have been able to deliver to our customers. We have created a new era in software development with .NET. The productivity provided by the .NET framework has allowed applications to be created much quicker and has given developers the ability to focus on their business logic, not on the basic pieces that they want in every application. As connected applications have become more prevalent, security has become a focal point of angst and one of these basic pieces that developers need. To address these concerns, the .NET framework contains many fundamental security mechanisms making it simpler for developers to add security to their applications. For our native developers, we have concentrated on optimizing the performance of our generated code and delivered an unrivaled debugging experience. Visual Studio has also expanded its focus from the individual developer to the team of people that need to work together collaboratively to build and deliver software. With Visual Studio Team System, the whole lifecycle of an application now has great tools that we are continuing to invest in for Developers, Architects, Testers and Database Professionals.

As part of this celebration, earlier today at VSLive in San Francisco we announced that we have acquired DevBiz Solutions, the makers of Teamplain Web Access for Team System, and publishing the Orcas Wave (Orcas + Rosario) roadmap for VSTS.

Teamplain is a web front end for VSTS that enables users to access the majority of TFS functionality from within a web browser. Teamplain gives VSTS a new avenue to reach a broader array of people within the development team who don’t use VS2005 today and don’t want to install VS clients on their machine. Our developer community has been telling us for the past year that we need a web UI for VSTS, and Teamplain would be a great solution for us. We’ve listened, looked very closely at the product and concluded acquiring Teamplain was the right thing to do. Effective today, Teamplain will be available as a free download to users of TFS. You can learn more about this product, and how it benefits VSTS in a Q&A interview with Brian Harry.

Namaste!