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Inside Visual Studio 2005 Team System

An anonymous reader writes "ZDNet has posted a top 10 list of things you need to know about Visual Studio 2005 Team System. From the article: Everybody talks about collaborative development tools, and heaven knows you can't surf the major developers' for 10 minutes without getting hit by banners trumpeting the latest. We can't fault Microsoft for wanting a piece of that action; but we need more than just a collaborative environment."

8 of 156 comments (clear)

  1. part of the plan to grow over-arching applications by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 1, Informative
  2. Scary Reading! by Darius+Jedburgh · · Score: 4, Informative
    Here I am, developing software for a living. I know C++ (and all the latest C++ techniques, or so I thought), how to use g++ (and CL) and how to write a Makefile. Collaboration is easy: I share a filesystem and perforce repository with my colleagues. And I talk to them, sometimes using a whiteboard.

    But I looked at that web page: Codex, T-SQL, inscrutable jokes about woodpeckers, meta-models, Da Vinci, Biztalk Server 2004, Visio and text whose individual words I understand and yet whose sentences I can't grasp. I must be some kind of dinosaur ('dragon' if you live in Kansas) from an age gone by. Uh...uh...uh...>panic!...I've no clue what they're talking about. Does that mean I'm not collaborating properly? I didn't even realize. This is so awful. What can I do? Obviously just talking to people isn't enough.

  3. The problem is... by Anonymous+Brave+Guy · · Score: 2, Informative

    ...as long as the underlying system for a single guy at his desk isn't up to scratch, it doesn't really matter how good the collaboration aspects and high-level funkiness are.

    We've been working with VC++2005 since the early betas, and it's been very hit and miss. On some systems it runs fine, but on others ("possibly those without hyperthreading processors" is the closest we've got to a pattern so far) it can go into a trance for literally minutes while it faffs around updating all that clever Intellisense it does on-the-fly these days.

    Add to that a debugger that really does run code orders of magnitude slower than a properly compiled version when you step through it, and you've got a serious problem with the two main tools in VC++. Worse, these are things that were fine back in VC++ 6, and rapidly went downhill when MS started relying on .Net and a multi-language framework for the dev tools a few years ago, which isn't exactly a great recommendation for all this new technology MS want us to use.

    In other words, the TS stuff is all very well, but until the fundamental problems with the single-user everyday stuff are fixed, it's rather academic at this point. Several of my colleagues never "upgraded" from VC++6 to any of the earlier .Net versions because the basic functionality wasn't up to the job, and the same is in danger of happening this time, too.

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  4. Re:Team System is overkill bloat by xornor · · Score: 2, Informative

    Our team uses Subversion in conjunction with http://www.edgewall.com/trac/ and I think it works great! It can be a little tricky to get setup the first time (at least on a mac) but it's well worth it.

  5. GForge? by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 2, Informative

    So basically they've recreated http://www.gforge.org/ out of proprietary components.

  6. Channel 9 by ChaserPnk · · Score: 3, Informative

    I've really been enjoying some of the videos being posted on Channel 9--part of MSDN. It's great to see what real MS engineers are working and thinking on. Just the other day, they posted a video covering Visual Studio TFS.

    I'm surprised at myself for liking these videos. I keep going to Chan.9 more than once a day. It's great to get a peek behind the scenes at MS development.

    --

    "A diplomat is a man who always remembers a woman's birthday but never remembers her age." -Robert Frost
  7. Re:A challenge by rocjoe71 · · Score: 2, Informative
    They're harder to see because web services are really a solution aimed at the business-to-business market so even when they get used, its use is overlooked because businesses are likelier to trumpet what the web service grants them to do rather than the use of the web service itself.

    For example, my favorite public-facing web service has got to be the USPS address correction web service, but if a company were to exploit this API, any press they create for it would probably read "Company ABC in partnership with USPS to increase mail delivery productivity".

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  8. Re:A Java mindset? by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 1, Informative

    It's not really a Java mindset. .Net developpers are already using those practices as well - just not using MS' tools. We've already got tons of great tools for source control, unit testing, refactoring and all that good stuff (many of which are open source, some of them originated from the java world indeed). The news is MS came out with their own solution to do this instead of using everybody else's tools.

    Quite frankly, VS 2005 Team Suite being over 10 times the cost of the VS 2005 Pro (plus the costs of the Team Server), we'll stick to our good old tools (Perforce, NUnit, etc). Just can't justify the costs.