It's a bit of an anticlimax in the shadow of the Visual Studio 2008 RTM last week, but the Microsoft Visual Studio Team System Code Name 'Rosario' November 2007 CTP is now available for download.  Those you you who don't enjoy living on the bleeding edge can ignore it and bask in the glow of your shiny new VS 2008 download :)  Those of you who've been using VS 2008 CTPs and Betas for a year or more and are wondering why everyone is making so big a deal about it actually shipping might want to take a peak at the Rosario CTP.

Please keep in mind that this is not a Beta - it is still a very early look at the kinds of things that we think will be in Rosario.  It is delivered in VPC form only and is not to be used in production environments.  The feature set is subject to change and no schedule has been announced.  With VS 2008 just shipped, we are reevaluating our plans in light of the developing plans for the next version of VS.  In the next few months, that will probably settle down a bit.

In the mean time have fun with the Rosario CTP.  Features new to this CTP include:

Architecture Edition

  • Visualizing Interaction Sequences between Service-Oriented applications
  • Using the Distributed System Designers and the Web Service Software Factory to build WCF applications
  • Designing and Visualizing Interactions between classes

Development Edition

  • Simplify Code Analysis rule selection with Rule Sets
  • Find and fix a bug using the historical debugger
  • Identify the test impact of code changes
  • Find a bug on a separate machine using the standalone debugger

Test Edition

  • Planning a testing effort
  • Executing manual test cases

Team Foundation Server

  • Manage user stories with the Agile Process
  • Manage features with the CMMI Process
  • Manage TFS work item heirarchies and dependencies with Microsoft Project
  • Organize work item queries in to folders
  • Rollback a version control checkin easily
  • Destroy and Delete work items and work item types and rename work item types

Customers can immediately begin downloading the VPC images from our download page.  Because of the size of the VPC, I'd recommend using a download manager, such as the one referred to here, to download the following seven parts of this release:

http://download.microsoft.com/download/b/f/9/bf9c1b30-ca2d-4381-8e9e-8b5db9701437/Nov2007RosarioCTP_TFSVSTS_7PartsTotal.part01.exe http://download.microsoft.com/download/b/f/9/bf9c1b30-ca2d-4381-8e9e-8b5db9701437/Nov2007RosarioCTP_TFSVSTS_7PartsTotal.part02.rar http://download.microsoft.com/download/b/f/9/bf9c1b30-ca2d-4381-8e9e-8b5db9701437/Nov2007RosarioCTP_TFSVSTS_7PartsTotal.part03.rar http://download.microsoft.com/download/b/f/9/bf9c1b30-ca2d-4381-8e9e-8b5db9701437/Nov2007RosarioCTP_TFSVSTS_7PartsTotal.part04.rar http://download.microsoft.com/download/b/f/9/bf9c1b30-ca2d-4381-8e9e-8b5db9701437/Nov2007RosarioCTP_TFSVSTS_7PartsTotal.part05.rar http://download.microsoft.com/download/b/f/9/bf9c1b30-ca2d-4381-8e9e-8b5db9701437/Nov2007RosarioCTP_TFSVSTS_7PartsTotal.part06.rar http://download.microsoft.com/download/b/f/9/bf9c1b30-ca2d-4381-8e9e-8b5db9701437/Nov2007RosarioCTP_TFSVSTS_7PartsTotal.part07.rar

Feedback in the form of bugs and suggestions can be submitted via http://connect.microsoft.com/visualstudio. Make sure when you submit issues through Connect that you indicate the product version as being “Visual Studio Team System Code Name “Rosario” (November 2007 CTP)”. That will ensure it gets to the right folks for consideration. If you have a question or would like provide feedback to the product team, we’ve created a special forum specifically focused on Rosario: http://forums.microsoft.com/MSDN/ShowForum.aspx?ForumID=1736&SiteID=1. We look forward to hearing from you.

You can visit our MSDN Rosario page to learn more about the Rosario release and the scenarios we are try to address.

Brian