I'm sitting in the staff room with Harry Pierson watching Steve Ballmer's Keynote address. Steve is always a good speaker and a lot of fun to listen to.
While we were hanging out, Harry said, "Have you been to the Architecture site this morning?" (In case you don't know, he is largely responsible for that excellent piece of content. Check it out here.)
I had been there lately, but I hadn't been there this morning. So after a couple of failed attempts to get on the wireless network, I hit the site.
(At about this point, Steve is talking about the developer tools that use automation to increase developer productivity.)
When I finally get the MSDN Architecture Center website up, what do I see at the top of the page but a link to Announcing VIsual Studio 2005 Team System for Architects.
This suite of products, formerly known as Burton, is an amazing looking collection of tools to extend the VS.NET environment with enterprise team development tools like:
- Source Control: A new "server- and database-based change manegement system that is scalable to large teams and projects."
- Work Item Tracking: "designed to manage a development life cycle end-to-end."
- Testing Tools - "Test Explorer is a convenient way to view all of the tests, including manual, unit, and load tests..."
- Advanced Development Tools - Static analysis tools... unit testing tools... performance profilers... build server...
All I can say is WOW! If this stuff delivers on the promises offered on the documentation up already, then Microsoft will have produced the most significant improvement to the development suite since... well... since the release of Visual C++ or Visual Basic.
Finally, the tools will have broad support for large development teams. For distributed development teams. It will finally provide a source control system that works. An integrated unit testing platform.
The Whidbey announcement last fall was huge for the general development community, but for me, a person who has to lead teams of people to get real work done, this is more important.
Here are a few links:
UPDATE: The demo just finished and it looks pretty darn good. The code coverage tool was interesting... red source indicates code that wasn't exercised by the test, while green source indicates that it was run by the tests. Sounds interesting. They didn't show the source code repository stuff, which disappointed me. They also demoed PREfast which is a cool integrates security analysis tool. This still is really going to be great.
