Prescriptive Guidance for Visual Studio Team System

The patterns & practices team has recently released an impressive set of guidance that you can use to get more out of Visual Studio Team System. One of the things that I continuously hear from you is a strong need for more guidance on how to best use our tools in the real world.

We at Microsoft are big believers of self-hosting (aka dog-fooding) our products and technologies well before we ask our customers to use our products. In Visual Studio tools, I have a simple philosophy – let’s give our customers what we use internally and let’s use internally what we give our customers. For example, we are self-hosting on Visual Studio Team System and Team Foundation Server to build Visual Studio “Orcas”.

The Visual Studio Team System Guidance project is an outgrowth of what we have learned while using Team System ourselves and combining that with what our customers have learned as they adopt these tools successfully in their environments. This project is a collaborative effort between patterns & practices team, Team System team members, and industry experts. We believe the advice can scale from small to medium-sized teams all the way up to massive development projects, such as building Visual Studio itself!

We decided to put this project on CodePlex not only to get guidance into your hands but to have a two-way engagement with you so that together we can create the right guidance that better addresses your needs.

You can provide your feedback by sending mail to VSGuide@microsoft.com or posting comments to the project discussion page.

Namaste!