What an exciting day!  Head to Visual Studio Team System for more information on the announcement at TechEd today.  Microsoft will be releasing an extensible set of software development life-cycle tools that help software teams collaborate to reduce the complexity of delivering modern service-oriented solutions.  This solution includes brand new source code control and work item tracking components. 

If you are attending TechEd and interested in work item tracking, defect tracking, bug tracking, requirements management, or software project management, try the following sessions:

Tuesday 10:45am  DEV200 An in-depth demo of the entire Visual Studio Team System

Tuesday 1:30pm DEV300 A drill down on the project management aspects of VSTS

Thursday 3:15pm DEV303 A drill down on source code control and work item tracking

I myself will be presenting a cabana session on extensibility and customization of the work item tracking component on Thursday 5-6:15pm DEVC39.  I’ll also be available at the Visual Studio booth in the pavilion.  If not me, you might try to find Kevin Kelly another program manager or Amit Ghosh who is one of the developers working on the work item tracking component.

You may be asking yourself, why is Microsoft developing a bug tracking solution?  Aren’t there enough of these out there already?  The answer is yes and no.  Yes, there are several bug tracking tools out there, but if you think too narrowly about just bug tracking you’re missing the point.  The intention is to deliver an extensible infrastructure that can be configured and extended to support all work item types that are important to software teams.  These could be tasks, features, requirements, scenarios, bugs, etc.  The second difference is we want to support deep integrations with other aspects of the software development lifecycle like source code control and project management without (and this is key) compromising ease-of-use .

More soon on what makes up a Visual Studio Team System work item type…