DEV200: Visual Studio Team System
Visual Studio is moving from a developer-focused to a development-focused environment. Visual Studio Team System is an extensible life-cycle tools platform that helps software teams collaborate to reduce the complexity of delivering solutions. The three design goals were:
- Reduce complexity of managing software products;
- Facilitate communication across a project;
- Enable a viable third-party ecosystem for add-ins.
VS Team Architect, VS Team Developer and VS Team Test are three role-based products that will address needs such as application and class modelling, code profiling and analysis and load testing. There will also be a server product: Visual Studio Team Foundation that will support change management, work item tracking, reporting, project management and integration services. Several of these components also integrate into other Office System products - for example, VSTS includes an add-in for Microsoft Project that allows a project manager to integrate their planning with the development project server.
The Community Tech Preview May bits (as distributed at TechEd) will include the VSTS client tools, but won't include the server components at this stage. VS 2005 Beta 1 will be the Professional Edition and so won't contain VSTS at all, however the next CTP after this (July/Aug) will include a more complete implementation of VSTS.
Full details of the Team Server product line can be found online as part of MSDN.