Everything you want to know about Visual Studio ALM and Farming
Brian Harry is a Microsoft Technical Fellow working as the Product Unit Manager for Team Foundation Server. Learn more about Brian.
More videos »
A few weeks ago I wrote a blog post talking about some of our TFS 2010 feature set – I’m referring to the one on Admin & Setup. In that post I talked about compatibility and supported dependency versions. One of the things that I mentioned was that we would be supporting VS 2008 clients through an update to the Team Explorer 2008 client and VS 2003 clients (and earlier) through an update to the MSSCCI provider but that, based on an analysis on usage trends, we had decided not to support VS 2005 clients.
I got quite a strong reaction from customers, partners and the field objecting to the lack of VS2005 support. You can read the comments here to get a flavor for some of it.
We’ve listened to the feedback and thought hard about it. We’ve decided to release an update to Team Explorer 2005 so that VS 2005 clients can also work with TFS 2010 servers. Like with VS 2008, the feature set will be reduced compared to VS 2010 clients but core developer functionality will be available. I’d like for the list of support/unsupported features for VS 2005 & VS 2008 to be the same but we are still working through the cost to do this work and have not finalized on a few decisions.
I’ll post about this again within a few months when I can explain the full set of decisions that we’ve made but I wanted you to know that we’ve heard you and are adjusting our plans.
Brian
Hi Brian - good to see, and thanks for listening! The only quesion is - will you ensure that it can do at least what TFS 2005 can do?
rob
I almost included the statement that it would but I'm not quite ready to promise that. We still have a few decisions left to make that could affect some parity issues. I don't think they are going to be big but until we've decided I'd rather not speculate.
Yay! This definitely makes our upgrade path smoother. With only 20 users and one Technical Director (me) keeping TFS running in my spare time, it'll be nice to get the server up and solid before worrying about re-training the users.
Can you guys make product work "out of box" if box is good enough for developers? You keep coming with new versions and all nothing but crap. sourcesafe is way better than big dump tfs elephant.
Thanks for listening. Now we don't have to keep our existing TFS 2008 server installation running to support VS2005 clients.
Thanks for supporting VS2005. I know this will be a big help for us to be able to get onboard to TFS2010 once it is released.
Good decision - lots of people I know will have to maintain vs2005 projects for the foreseeable future.
Thanks for listening, this is a big deal for us.
Thanks for the update Harry. For my organization this is a big relief. We also do maintenance, which means we see a lot of BizTalk/SharePoint solutions that are stuck with VS2005.
A question though... these new Team Explorer's for 2005 and 2008, are they going to be shipped with the RTM of TFS 2010 or out of band?
We plan to ship the 2008 update before 2010 Beta 2 and the 2005 update about the same time 2010 releases. I don't think either will be "in the box". They will be separate downloads.
TFS will be providing a General Distribution Release (GDR) to enable older versions of Visual Studio
it's out:
http://www.microsoft.com/downloads/details.aspx?FamilyID=22215e4c-af6f-4e2f-96df-20e94d762689&displaylang=en
Hi, I have Visual Studio 2005 Professional in Spanish, I installed the unique Team Explorer in Microsoft Downloads, which is in English, and then the SP1 (in Spanish).
When I tried to install vs2005 gdr, it doesn't recognize the vs2005 installed in my machine, so I couldn't install that to connect to TFS2010.
Steps: VS2005 Pro > TE2005 > VS2005 SP1 > GDR
Is the language the problem :S? or the GDR is not compatible with Pro editions (I couldn't believe that because TE2005 is a different component to VS)
Thanks for your attention
Hi Brian,
We are facing a problem when using the forward compatibility pack when using custom checkin policies; very briefly following is our scenario any pointers??
Scenario
TFS 2010
One Team Project collection
One team project
Custom Checkin Policy built for VS 2005
Custom Checkin Policy built for VS 2010
Users are not allowed to override any checkin policy, we reistrict this via server side eventing.
Issue being faced:
Policy compiled for VS 2005 comes up as unregistered in VS 2010 and vice versa even though we have added the registery entries in
HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\SOFTWARE\Microsoft\VisualStudio\10.0\TeamFoundation\SourceControl\Checkin Policies, for the VS2005 Dll and
HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\SOFTWARE\Microsoft\VisualStudio\8.0\TeamFoundation\SourceControl\Checkin Policies, for the VS2010 Dlls.
We are using TFS 2010 with SP1 and Visual Studio Team Explorer 2005 forward compatibility update to support TFS 2010