Microsoft Visual Studio 2005 Team System

Microsoft Visual Studio 2005 Team System

Today's software systems are comprised of numerous distributed services, spanning platforms, protocols, and programming languages, all with significant impact on the operations environment. Moreover, teams have become increasingly specialized and geographically distributed. Successful deployment of modern solutions depends on bridging the communication gap between development and operations so that the entire IT department is represented early and often throughout the software lifecycle.

The importance of team communication

We know instinctively that communication is essential to accomplishing anything as a team. The great sports teams of yore have taught us that all the talent and money in the world doesn't buy success on the field unless the team functions as a cohesive unit. Software developers, like modern athletes, have become increasingly specialized. The term "developer" can apply equally to those building Web front ends, groups building the server infrastructure, and the person fleshing out the database.

At the same time as roles have become more specialized, teams have become more geographically distributed. Whether it's the small consultant shop setup at customer sites across town or the large multi-site enterprise, a software development team may work together across local, national, and international boundaries.

Delivering service-oriented solutions

Application development itself is no longer monolithic applications residing on a desktop machine. Deploying a full-fledged enterprise application often means touching many aspects of the data center. A client application deployed to thousands of desktops or a Web server farm may interact with numerous backend Web services and databases located throughout an organization. Visualizing such applications can be complicated.

At the same time, many of these Web services are hosted and managed by IT operations staff responsible for keeping the services available and functioning. Often, the operations staff has specific requirements for security, reliability, performance, and more. Application development must be informed and constrained by these requirements in order to ensure successful deployment of solutions. This is what we call design for operations, and it enables application developers and operations managers to collaborate more effectively.

Introducing Visual Studio 2005 Team System

The new Visual Studio 2005 Team System expands significantly on Microsoft's demonstrated successes in delivering highly productive tools, by offering businesses tightly integrated and extensible lifecycle tools to increase the predictability of their software development process. With Visual Studio Team System, organizations can:

• Reduce the complexity of delivering modern service-oriented solutions that are designed for operations
• Facilitate collaboration among all members of a software team, speeding development time and ensuring the predictability and reliability of the development process
• Customize and extend the Team System with their own internal tools and process frameworks, or choose from over 450 supplemental products from over 190 partners

Visual Studio 2005 Team System consists of:

Enabling a vibrant partner ecosystem

Visual Studio Team System is more than a suite of lifecycle tools. It's also a lifecycle platform that enables third-parties, customers, and solution providers to extend the base functionality with new features and customize the tool for the unique aspects of certain businesses.

For partners, Visual Studio Team System offers a platform for consistently integrating third-party tools into the existing workflow of the development team. With the Team System, partners can share data between tools and respond to actions teams trigger throughout the development process. Customers benefit through a wide variety of third-party tools that supplement the Team System and enable them to reuse their existing skills and knowledge of the development workflow.