Wednesday, May 11, 2005

Team System

In addition to Visual Studio 2005, MS will be rolling out a new suite of products called Team System. It includes Team Foundation server and three SKU versions of Visual Studio, namely Architect, Developer and Tester. Although there is a stand alone Visual Source 2005, Team Foundation Server includes a completely new Source Control sytem as well as integrated project and task management, process managment (eg. msf agile) and project reporting.

Team Server source control will address several of the long standing issues associated with VSS.
TSSC has parallel development, so you don't have to exclusively check out files.
TSSC has remote development so you can easily connect over web and don't have to be on the lan.
TSSC uses SQL Server under the covers so it's less likely to be corrupted and it supports atomic checkins.

Team Server is about $3,000. It integrates tightly into Visual Studio 2005 with a new "Team Explorer" window. Team Server can also integrate with MS Project, and Excel. In addition some features and reports can be accessed through a web based interface that is using sharepoint under the covers.