Yesterday Soma posted an entry that we have made available the first Release Candidate of Visual Studio 2005.  This Release Candidate already includes the client/role based portions of the new Visual Studio 2005 Team System, including Visual Studio 2005 Team Suite.  We are also readying the availability of Beta 3 of Visual Studio 2005 Team Foundation Server, the server component of Visual Studio 2005 Team System.  Currently I think we're about 14 days out on those bits so we're very close.

 

With the RTM versions of the client/role based skus coupled w/ the Beta 3 version of Team Foundation Server you can driver enterprise grade collaboration that will enable development teams to communicate and collaborate more effectively.  Using the RTM/Beta 3 mix you will be able to:

 

  • Use Work Items to communicate information about bugs, requirements, status, deliverables and more
  • Use built-in Reporting and Analytics, based on SQL Server 2005, to gain accurate information about your project’s health and obtain greater predictability throughout the development process
  • Use enterprise-grade source code control to maintain the largest, most complex source code bases
  • Use built-in Process Guidance to manage the software development lifecycle most efficiently

 

Over the last several months, we have been using Team Foundation Server internally within the Visual Studio Team System team.  During that timeframe, we have stressed this product in many of the same ways that we expect our customers to and have extraordinary confidence in its quality, reliability, and performance.  For example, the Team System team has used Team Foundation Server to maintain:

 

  • nearly 500 active users on the Team System project
  • 6 active sites (Redmond, Fargo, Raleigh, Copenhagen, India, China)
  • nearly 10,000 changeset checkins over the last 10 months (and about 1700 changesets  in the last 4 weeks)
  • Nearly 550,000 files
  • 10M+ lines of code
  • 47GB of assets under management

 

This Beta 3 release of Team Foundation Server will include a GoLive license as well as product support.  It will be made available for MSDN subscribers to download from the MSDN download area.  Non-subscribers will be able to order the Beta 3 of Team Foundation Server as part of the Visual Studio 2005 Trial Edition beginning at the November 7th launch of Visual Studio 2005.

 

Over the coming months we will continue to lock down the Team Foundation Server to prepare it for the most rigorous use both by our customers and within Microsoft.  As we’ve stated earlier, we expect to ship the final version of Team Foundation Server in the first quarter of next year.  We are committed to ensuring safe and in place migration of data from Team Foundation Server Beta 3 to the final version of Team Foundation Server.

 

I want to thank all of our customers and partners for helping us get to this important milestone in the release cycle of Visual Studio 2005.  We think we’ve built something pretty special with these products, and the excitement and enthusiasm we’re seeing from all our customers is nothing short of phenomenal.

 

-Rick