Visual Studio.NET 2008 goes live!

Well, the long wait is finally over for Microsoft-technology developers. Visual Studio.NET 2008 (formerly code-named Orcas) was released by Microsoft on Nov 19th 2007. Microsoft immediately made the release available for download from MSDN for users with a current subscription. In addition to the IDE and other developer tools, an enhanced Team Foundation Server was also released providing a series of new capabilities to users.

My team and I have been using Team Foundation Server for a year now and it's dramatically changed not only the way the developers work, but also opened up access to all of the artifacts around the creation of software to other non-developer staff. Before TFS, we used SharePoint to manage non-code items and although SharePoint is a great tool, it required a lot of up front customizing to work well for us, and the learning curve to use it was steep. I've yet to see a SharePoint site in practice that is easy to use and any number of modern web sites that focus on productivity.

Since we use Scrum heavily as our process, the ability to integrate 3rd party templates into TFS to ensure it conforms with Scrum was also hugely helpful. Again, the tool serves us, not the other way around as is often the case with groupware products. My only complaint is that TFS still isn't making it easy to perform upgrades of templates when they need to change. Even now, you have to export all of the data to something like Excel and then re-import it back into the new template. This is ok for small projects, but not when they grow to include thousands of work items and gigabytes of source code. Hopefully this is an area that Microsoft will spend more effort on in the next version of TFS.

http://msdn2.microsoft.com/en-us/vstudio/products/aa700830.aspx

Posted by Mark M. Baker at 12:41 PM  Permalink