Editor's Note: New and Improved Team

Editor's Note

New and Improved Team

We've all been subconsciously conditioned through the years to turn a skeptical eye towards claims of being "new and improved." After all, the phrase often means that some favorite feature has been turned into a new deficiency. Who can forget a few years ago when a favorite brand of chocolate suddenly showed up on shelves with a "New size!" label? It turned out that they reduced the size of the bags from 14 ounces to 13—and you could experience this new size for the same old price. (Not to point any fingers, I'll call these candies "Unicode character U+041C" & "Unicode character U+041C"'s.) But sometimes a new and improved product really is new and improved. Take Visual Studio 2005 Team System, for example. It's packed with new features that create a virtual playground for the imagination (albeit without the dangerous Jungle Gym).

Visual Studio Team System is actually a family of products that includes specialized builds for testers, developers, and architects. (They are available as part of the complete Visual Studio Team System package or, with an MSDN Subscription, they can be obtained individually.) The core of each build is the same: you get Visual Studio 2005, a class designer, UML modeling with Visio, database tools, Visual SourceSafe, enterprise templates, modeling tools, and Microsoft Office programmability.

Beyond that, the edition you should work in depends on your job role. If you're an architect, for instance, you'll want to install the version that caters to your needs. For architects, this means getting an application designer, a deployment designer, and a logical infrastructure designer.

Developers, on the other hand, get some extra tools that make it far easier to understand, debug, and test their code. The additional tools let you perform unit testing, plot your code coverage, run code profiling, and make use of a dynamic code analyzer and static code analyzer.

Testers will find Visual Studio Team System particularly useful, with great attention given to making their jobs easier. The edition tailored for testing includes the unit testing and code coverage features found in the developer edition, but also adds tools for load testing, manual testing, test case management, and Web testing.

Visual Studio Team Suite, which includes all of this and then some, offers a lot of product in the box (or download). Some of the tools are similar to tools previously offered by ISVs in various forms. This past March, we spoke with a number of developers at SD West in Santa Clara and heard some frank concerns. In general, the ISVs were concerned that Visual Studio Team System would cannibalize their products. And they were worried that Visual Studio Team System would do everything, leaving no room for further innovation by third-party developers.

Far from being the end-all for everything, Visual Studio Team System introduces many concepts, like unit testing, to the package while leaving room for more comprehensive features. Over the next year to 18 months, we expect the market for add-on tools for Visual Studio to really blossom. Visual Studio has been designed with extensibility in mind, so third-parties have many opportunities to enhance the basic tools provided in the box.

In this issue, we've got an example of how you can extend Visual Studio Team System. Wen Ding shows you on page 123 how to enhance the load testing tool in Visual Studio Team System by creating Web-based reports. Your entire team will be able to see the latest results online as soon as the load test is complete.

If you want to step back and look at all that Visual Studio Team System has to offer, check out the overview Chris Menegay did in our special Visual Studio 2005 Guided Tour bonus issue. If you haven't had the chance to peruse this minimag, it is well worth your time. We've updated the articles to cover the release version of Visual Studio 2005, walking you through Visual Basic, C#, C++, ASP.NET 2.0, and much more. You can look it over at msdn.microsoft.com/msdnmag/issues/06/00/default.aspx and even download it. Drop on by and check it out!

—J.T.

Thanks to Thanks to the following Microsoft technical experts for their help with this issue: Ryan Cavalcante, Joe Duffy, Neil Enns, Mark Fussel, Lukasz Gwozdz, Brian Jones, Hao Kung, Ronald Laeremans, Michael Miele, Lukasz Pawlowski, Stefan Schackow, Maura Van Der Linden, and Mike Vernal.

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