Yesterday we announced acquisition of Team Plain. This is really a great move by us. I have seen Team Plain and I feel it is a key component in increasing reach of TFS in non development community. Having a web access to all the major features especially the Work Item tracking system is key to success. I don't think we can accept any non developer to install and use Visual Studio. This is a great move by us.

You can read more at Brian's Blog or MSDN

Today I gave a talk at Dev Connections conference in Orlando at 9:45am. The topic of the talk was "Visual Studio 2005 Team Foundation Server Planning and Deployment".

Link to Presentation: Dev Connection Presentation

The Visual Studio "Orcas" March CTP is available and now contains TFS.  In this, you will find the majority of the feature work we plan to do for our Orcas release.  I appreciate those of you who can look it over and give us feedback.  Use http://connect.microsoft.com to give us the feedback (or, if you want, you can comment on this post and I will forward it but Connect is better). This CTP is being released as both a Virtual PC (VPC) image and Installable Bits for both VSTS and TFS. 

If you wish to use the Virtual PC image, you will need Virtual PC or Virtual Server to run this image. You can use Virtual PC 2004 or Virtual PC 2007 (2007 required to run the VPC on Windows Vista). If you wish to use the self-extracting install, we advise that you do not install this on a production machine. If you have Vista as the OS on your box, please only download the VPC. In either case, depending on your hardware the download files make take between 30-60 minutes to decompress.

Use the following links for step-by-step instructions on installing and using the VPC images or installable bits, links to the ReadMe and provide feedback.

• VSTS Team Suite Virtual PC Image
• TFS Virtual PC Image
• VSTS Team Suite Self-extracting Install
• TFS Self-extracting Install

See Readme document for important notices and information about the CTP.

Here is some detail on the new stuff you will find in Team System.

Team Architect

• Top-down service design - Top-down system design allows an application architect/lead developer to perform the design of a business solution without having to be confronted with technology decisions. It enables the user to progressively refine a high-level system design, designing new sub-systems and applications in the context of the system in which they are to be used.
• Architectural Roles on System, Applications and Endpoints - Enables an architect, while working on the high-level design of a system's architecture using the System Designer, to introduce elements into the design that play a specific pre-defined architectural role(s) within architectural patterns.

Team Developer

• Profiler Support for WCF Applications - Enable profiling of WCF based applications to improve application performance
• Customize and extend code correctness policies - Code Analysis Check-in Policy improvements to communicate to a developer why the check-in policy failed and to provide guidance on how to pass the policy requirements.
• Performance tune an enterprise application - Enables developers to run profiling during load and test procedures for a system, to see how it behaves, and use integrated tools to profile, debug and tune. This also enables performance base-lining, so that users can save a baseline profile and then, if the performance degrades, compare up-to-date traces to identify the source of the regression

Team Test

• Unit Test Generation Improvements - Improvements to unit test generation provide an easy way for the user to specify what methods to test, and generate test methods and helper code to do unit testing, as well as providing unit test support for generics.
• Web Test Validation Rule Improvements - Web Test rules improvements enable testers to create more comprehensive validation rules for the application being tested. These improvements include the following functions:
  • Stop test on error
  • Search request and response
  • Add validation rule for title
  • Redirect validation
  • Provide test level validation rules
  • Expected HTTP code
  • Warning level for errors on dependents
• Better Web Test Data Binding - This feature allows users to data bind .CSV and XML files, as well as databases to a web test, using a simple databinding wizard.
• Improved Load Test Results Management - With this feature user can open or remove an existing load test result from the load test repository. User can also import and export load test results files.

Team Foundation Server

• Team Build
  • Support multi-threaded builds with the new MSBuild.
  • Continuous Integration – There are many components to this, including build queuing and queue management, drop management (so that users can set policies for when builds should be automatically deleted), and build triggers that allows configuration of exactly how when CI builds should be triggered, for example – every checkin, rolling build (completion of one build starts the next), etc.
  • Improved ability to specify what source, versions of source, etc to include in a build.
  • Improved ability to manage multiple build machines.
  • Simplified ability to specify what tests get run as part of a build
• Version Control support
  • Destroy- The version control destroy operation provides administrators with the ability to remove files and folders from the version control system. The destroyed files and folders cannot be recovered once they are destroyed. Destroy allows administrators to achieve SQL server disk space usage goals without constantly needing to add more disks to the data tier machine. Destroy also facilitates removing versioned file contents that must be permanently removed from the system for any other reason.
  • Annotate - Annotate is a feature that allows developers to inspect a source code file and see at line-by-line level of detail who last changed each section of code. It brings together changeset data with difference technology to enable developers to quickly learn change history inside a source file.
  • Folder Diff - Team Foundation Server now supports compare operations on folders, whereby the contents of the folder are recursively compared to identify files that differ. Folder diff can compare local folders to local folders, local folders to server folders, and server folders to server folders. It's a great way of identifying differences between branches, files that you've changed locally, and files that have changed between two points in time.
  • Get Latest on Checkout - As an optional setting on a team project or on an individual basis, you can have Team Foundation Server always download the latest version of a file when you check it out. This helps ensure that you don't have to merge your changes with somebody else's when you check the file back in.
• Performance and Scale
  • This release includes numerous improvements in performance and scalability of Team Foundation Server.