Some of you may have seen from Soma's blog that we are confirming that VS 2005 (including the VSTS role based skus) will RTM November 7th.  Everyone here has been working hard to get the bugs fixed and the fit and finish into the product for several months and to now be this close to the RTM of version 1.0 is very exciting for us and for our customers.  We also announced that we will release a beta 3 of the Team Foundation Server in September and enable all customers to go live (deploy into production) with those bits.  We will carry all of the data forward to the RTM version of the server, which we've said will follow the client (VSTS role based skus) RTM by 60-90 days.  Many customers who were experiementing with TFS Beta 2 reported major performance problems from the IDE in Beta 2 and those have been fixed in Beta 3 where the IDE performance is near parity with the command line performance (which has been very fast).

I've already had a few people ask me how the staged release of TFS impacts role out of VSTS broadly to organizations so i'll try and address broadly here.

  • the final beta 3 version of TFS will work with the RTM bits of VSTS clients. 
  • Customers who purchase the role based skus will be able to use the beta 3 TFS in production environment (today we have over 30 teams inside & outside of MS using TFS and VSTS in production)
  • We will provide support for TFS beta 3 for premier customers who've purchased the VSTS clients
  • We will release the RTM bits of TFS with a 60-90 day delta from client RTM
  • The TFS RTM install will continue to use all of the data/files customers have accumulated with the go-live version of Beta 3 with no data loss.

-Rick