posted on Monday, September 26, 2005 3:43 PM
by
davidboschmans
VSTS On-Tour
Last Friday the MSDN "Visual Studio Team System" On Tour-team visited Belgium. Eric Lee and Michael Leworthy - two product managers in the Visual Studio team focusing on Team System - did a great job explaining the key concepts and the more advanced topics of VSTS.
Until Friday I had seen a lot of demos of Visual Studio Team System and - as I've been doing a lot of them lately myself - I thought that I must have seen most of it. But I was wrong, completely wrong. With the arrival - and availability on MSDN subscriber downloads - of Visual Studio 2005 RC and Team Foudation Server Beta 3 (almost) all the existing demos - based on beta 2 - were upgraded to beta 3. And yes, beta 3 is a huge improvement!
Eric and Michael started with the fictional company AdventureWorks and how it leverages Visual Studio 2005 Team System and SQL Server 2005 Business Intelligence to plan the development efforts to meet the business objectives. Next they added the necessary functionality - using Team System - to transform AdventureWorks into a mission critical system. While doing this they were highlighting most of the development and testing features of Team System. In the afternoon Michael took a deep dive into extending Team Foundation Server. He showed how to create your own software development processes based on the provided ones MSF for Agile Development Development or MSF for CMMI Process Improvement. They also created their own work-item types using the team foundation extensibility kit.
During the breaks I talked to a number of attendees working for ISV's and most of them were impressed by the functional and the integration capabilities of VSTS. Looking forward to work closely with them and moving their existing applications and processes to Team System.
If you still have the chance to attend one of these VSTS On Tour's, don't hesitate to do so, you won't be disappointed!
If you still want to consult the slides of this event, you can check the msdn.be site. They will be on there in the next couple of days.