I’ve been threatening for 6 months to start blogging about VSTS 2010 features and somehow it’s just never made it to the top of my list.  With the Beta 1 release coming increasingly closer, it seems like I’m running out of time to tell you much about it before you can easily discover it all yourself.  So now seems like an opportune time to start.  Being, overall more intimately familiar with the details of the new TFS features, the series will focus more in that area than others but I thought I’d start with a big picture VSTS overview of what we’re doing in the 2010 release.

As I’ve said in a few posts before it’s a REALLY big release.  So to keep this post from being 30 pages, I’m going to keep this list to a very short list of very high level features.  The names of them will, in some cases, merely be provocative and I’ll follow up with subsequent posts containing details, screenshots, etc.  I’m not going to comment on new VS Pro 2010 features at this point but maybe I will after I get through all the Team System stuff.

There are awesome new features in every area of Team System 2010.  However there are 3 really “new” areas that are particularly worthy of note.  The most prominent is our investment in tools for testers that help make them amazingly productive, incorporate them into the overall software team and provide for seamless flow of information with the developers.  A related new area of investment is what we call “Lab Management”.  It is a set of features that makes it very easy for you to deploy and test software in many different configurations and then to debug and fix issues that the testing finds.  The other major “new” area is in architecture tools.  VSTS 2010 marks a significant departure from 2008 with a plethora of new tools to help you design and understand a wide variety of software systems.

BTW, please don’t ask me when Beta 1 will actually ship.  I’m quite certain I’m not allowed to give out dates right now but I’ll just say that the features have been done for a while now and we’re just testing and refining the quality.  After that comes the release process.  All of this takes a while but sitting on the inside it feels like we’re just about there.

On to the feature list.  I’ve put blog links next to each feature area where there is an active blog.  Please note this is not a comprehensive list but rather just new features in VSTS 2010.  Of course most of the 2008 features will be in 2010 too :)

Architecture (http://blogs.msdn.com/camerons/)

  • Architecture Explorer
  • Layer diagram
  • Use case designer
  • Activity designer
  • Component diagram
  • Logical class designer
  • Sequence diagram
  • Modeling project system
  • UML Model explorer
  • Architecture validation during build

Development & Database (http://blogs.msdn.com/habibh/)

  • Historical debugging
  • Test impact analysis
  • Improved code analysis
  • Improved profiling (especially multi-tier)
  • Database extensibility

Lab Management (http://blogs.msdn.com/amit_chatterjee, http://blogs.msdn.com/lab_management)

  • Multi-tier Environment creation and management
  • Automated deployment
  • Easily manage machine pools
  • Network fencing
  • Checkpoints

Test (http://blogs.msdn.com/amit_chatterjee, http://blogs.msdn.com/james_whittaker)

  • Test planning
  • Test case management
  • Test prioritization
  • Run management & reporting
  • Project quality reports
  • Manual test execution
  • Diagnostic recording (environment, video, etc)
  • UI Automation recording
  • Coded UI tests

TFS (my blog http://blogs.msdn.com/bharry)

  • Work item hierarchy & linking
  • Improved Agile template
  • MOSS & WSS Dashboards
  • Simplified reporting
  • Improved support for parallel development
  • Rollback
  • Build queuing and pooling
  • Gated checkin
  • Simplified setup
  • Scale out of web and data tiers
  • Admin console
  • Project move/archive/restore

If you don’t see your favorite feature here, don’t fret.  As I drill into the various areas I’ll give a lot more detail.  I’m trying to keep everything pretty high level here and save the detailed feature list for the drill down posts.

Brian