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."

Comments

New here?

[Gridpoet]

We can't fault Microsoft for wanting a piece of that action

you must be new here...this is slashdot

we can fault Microsoft for anything...

Oh, I get it

[tcopeland]

Team System's response to this problem is a Logical Datacenter Designer, which integrates clients, Web servers, SQL Servers and any other servers into constrained, schema-driven models that permit solution architectures to truly embrace the big picture with proper attention to networking and its impact on interface with data sources. This concept is especially welcome as Web services become increasingly central to integrated application systems.

Cool, OK, that clears it all up for me.

Re:Oh, I get it

[gcaseye6677]

I suppose it also helps you leverage synergy to facilitate best-of-breed 21st century paradigm-shift enterprise solutions.

Re:Oh, I get it

[ergo98]

Cool, OK, that clears it all up for me.

The submission article is TERRIBLE in every way. Loaded with buzzwords and nonsensical meaningless drivel, it was made for the sole purpose of getting hits. I wish I could mod down a front page story.

View the presentation from the Launch 2005 event and you'll get much more useful information than the tripe submission.

As one aside (quoted from the linked article): "There are far, far too many nuts-and-bolts geniuses out there who can rewrite DaVinci's Codex in T-SQL, but who think two-dimensional client-server architecture is good enough for Internet apps. To build decent apps today, and Internet apps in particular, you need more than an idea, more than good tools, more than an application-level design; you need an application architecture, a high-level framework that carefully addresses your applications' intended functionality within the context of your hardware, network, and data-source infrastructure -- and, worse yet, too many IT managers who know the buzzwords but don't yet really understand this. "

I find this humorous, because many of the designs that have crashed and burned terribly are the over-designed, n-tier, architectural astronaut abortions that were pushed on an unsuspecting public. On flip side, many of the designs that have pervaded and succeeded at tremendous levels of scale could best be described as "some scripts that hit a database". Slashdot, for instance. Wikipedia...Digg...I could go on.

Re:Oh, I get it

[ergo98]

Proper tiering of applications is considerably more scalable than a script, the modularity allows for much more flexible and adaptive caching per request, per application, and per user session...

Thanks for the lesson, professor. Ignoring the nonsensical caching comment, the point was indeed that applications start simple (scripts hitting a database), and organically scale out from there. The vast majority of real-world success stories evolved this way. They didn't start with a couple of managers and an architect sitting around a graph diagramming what they read in N-tier Weekly.

If someone said "Gee, I'm going to start a site called /.. Let's get started on the data layer objects....", they still wouldn't be done. Sadly, that is how most applications are developed.

Re:Oh, I get it

[ergo98]

Oh, and one more comment:

How long did it take /. to support CSS?

A better question, from a pragmatic, real-world perspective, would be "What did supporting CSS get them?". For the vast majority of readers, it isn't different from the classic table model at all (in fact it's a bit quirkier). I like CSS layout, but using Slashdot and CSS as an example is inane - they didn't support CSS because there was no practical reason to, other than a lot of Standards Astronauts beating on their door about their lack of CSS goodness.

Team System is overkill bloat

[Anonymous Coward]

As Microsoft had already completely nailed collaborative development with Visual SourceSafe.

Re:Team System is overkill bloat

[xornor]

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.

Re:Team System is overkill bloat

[kimvette]

And that is untrue of Visual SourceSafe, Rational ClearCase, CVS, or any other source control system how, exactly? If it stores in a DBMS of any sort (be it directories/files, a single monolithic file, or any other storage medium not composed of Magic Pixie Dust(tm) it can become corrupt. Heck, you could simply go old-school and tar up your project each day and run into corruption, causing you to have to roll back to a days-or-weeks-old backup.

So let's take your statement and s/Subersion/SourceSafe:

Source Safe is great, until it corrupts your repository so, that it cannot be recovered with the tools provided. Then you're glad you made daily backups of the repository, revert and continue as usual.

I mean, Source Safe IS great, and I am thinking of trying it under WINE and if it works roll it out, but it is not immune to corruption. If anything it is more prone to corruption given the higher risk of viruses/worms/etc. under Windows, not to mention NTFS flakiness. I haven't tried Subversion yet but do plan to but for a front end, unless you go all CLI, the GUI has a long way to go to catch up with Microsoft's VSS. Even Rational ClearCase couldn't match VSS for ease of use (at least not back when I used and administered it around 1999/2000), and ClearCase costs several^H^H^H^H^H^H^Hmany magnitudes more than VSS.

it's still a tool

[snitmo]

From TFA,

To build decent apps today, and Internet apps in particular, you need more than an idea, more than good tools

OK I need more than a tool.

Team System is addressing this shortfall in its Team Edition for Software Architects with a tool called Application Designer, a graphical workhorse for solution architecture.

So you give me a tool.

Huh?

Failed Miserably on Test-Driven Development

[under_score]

Check out Microsoft Takes it on the Chin Over Test-Driven Development. For comparison, check out Wikipedia on Test-Driven Development. This is particularly ironic given the recent Slashdot article about Microsoft adopting Scrum, one of the agile methodologies which, along with Extreme Programming, is instrumental in promoting Test-Driven Development as a core software engineering practice. I've also got a very brief article on my blog about the Qualities of an Ideal Test.

Bulky? Loaded?

[ashtophoenix]

So this new collaborative development environment, isn't it going to be as bulky, loaded and lacking in a basic concept as all other MS products? Take for example Visio. Some of the errors it gives me simply don't make any sense and get fixed by restarting it. Or MS Word, that hasn't been able to figure out yet, how to do numbering. Or maybe its way too advanced for us backward users, so it takes control and numbers my document on its own! I think Eclipse is a very well thought over IDE and the I would be happy with being provided something extremely lightweight for starts for which people would develop plugins that I could download install on a need-basis.

Re:Bulky? Loaded?

[Blakey Rat]

Or MS Word, that hasn't been able to figure out yet, how to do numbering.

Looks like your grammar checker is broken also.

unification theories disproved

[micromuncher]

Microsoft had an old saying... I have it on a mug honest... "One company does it all." Its true in everything Microsoft does, whether it be desktop os and app integration, the convergence around entertainment systems, or development tools.

I think the problem is that no unification theory holds. I software development, from a team perspective, from design to implementation to testing... regardless of what model you follow... the development team is most effective when they are not constrained by a tool.

In my current work environment, the company tried to standardize on one web server, one IDE, one OR mapper... it failed miserably. The reality is we have 4 web servers, a multitude of IDEs, and tons of different technologies that are fitting specific needs. Even on the Microsoft platform.

I do not doubt that the team tools are cool for collaboration. But they are going to be pushed into organizations that already have team tools, or ways of doing stuff.

Right tools for the right job? Most Rose managed projects I know fail. Who uses all the lifecycle stuff in JBuilder 2005? Is anyone tired of development environments that take gigs?

Superfluous!

[ObsessiveMathsFreak]

It's all superfluous it tell you! The best collaborative development tool is the low lying cubical partition! All else pales to it's abilites to facilitate a tight dev team. Oh and emails.

All this rubbish cruft in Visual studio these days. It's from the people that broght you Visual SourceSafe-Studio integration. Windows only, MS centric, homogenous coding standards, catering to the lowest common denominator of programmer in an effort to make coding more quantifyable for management. Basically, it's all just tools for making windows developers even more lazy than they already are, and to make project managers think they're more in control of their projects because of all the shiny graphs, network tools and printed reports.

Expect coding standards to drop in line with their usage.

Re:Superfluous!

[tshak]

It's all superfluous it tell you! The best collaborative development tool is the low lying cubical partition! All else pales to it's abilites to facilitate a tight dev team.

It must be nice working on a small team. Even then, since when was bug tracking, requirements tracking, or iteration task tracking superflous? Working on teams with dozens of people located in multiple locations around the world these features are almost critical.

Scary Reading!

[Darius Jedburgh]

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.

Re:Scary Reading!

[Anonymous Brave Guy]

Ah, I understand. My friend, I was once like you. Then I discovered that it's not talking to others that matters. It's what you say that counts! Fortunately, the web is a wonderful thing, and people like these have kindly provided resources to help you navigate this troublesome area more successfully. Good luck to you.

Re:Scary Reading!

[Azarael]

Sadly friend, all that marketing mumbo-jubo was not meant for you. It was meant for those managers who are incharge of a group of devs who are in the ineviable position of having little say on what tools they will use. I work in a room with the rest of my team. Our desks face each others. When I need to colaborate, I say hey you, "..". If you are in a situation where you can't break up your team enough to make this work then you probably have bigger problems then what colaboration software to use. You probably don't want some random one size fits all system of doing things imposed on you.

Re:Scary Reading!

[mpfife]

I don't know what's scarier, this article or the MS Dev 2005 launch party I just attended that was full of the exact same stuff. I'm also a dev that knows good C++/design patterns/cross-platform linux/win development and helped develop such flagships at Macromedia's Studio suite (parts of the engine not web apps) I kept wondering when it was we were going to learn about how to write a real *app*. The guy just kept scrunching together wizard after wizard to build his web 'solution'. At one point someone asked where the actual data lay on the server - and he couldn't answer - and nobody seemed to flinch! It was just run the wizards and connect the boxes. I didn't see one line of code written the whole time. And it didn't matter what language you used, just select it at the beginning and everything was merged together at the end by some kind of magic. God only knows what would happen if you started digging into this spagetti by hand.

I went there expecting to learn about how to code for new vista features, how to take advantage of the new system features, integration for cross-platform development, new tools for helping design, anything! But this was all web apps, all day long. I don't know what shocked me more, the fact that there was no code written that whole session (none by hand) or that the room was half full of nodding heads. Since when did Dev Studio, with the most harmoniously combined debugger and compiler out there, become Frontpage?

I got a free copy of Dev Studio there and it requires SQL server (also free). But it sits on my desk and I pause long and hard each time I think of unistalling my old version for this one.

Problem with the "Sophisticated Tools" paradigm

[sbenj]

Read through the article, sounds like a nice tool. I agree with the author's assertion about the lack of architecture in most development efforts.

That being said...

I've seen a fair number of high-power tools offerred that do everything from soup to nuts, UML, Code generation, integrated testing, etc, etc, etc. It's been my sense that to fully leverage these tools you kind of have to buy in all the way, you can use their architect tools, but you need to put a fair amount of effort into learning the tool, and then you're not developing in C# or whatever, but in the tool. You're then also locked into the constraints imposed by the tool.

Every sophisticated tool I mess with these days seems like it has this issue, and I guess it's structural- you have a simple core surrounded by proprietary extensions that in theory offer a lot of power and in practice require a huge buy in of time to leverage the extensions. For example, most java application servers have all kinds of built-in goodies (e.g. Jboss) but whenever I've worked with them I've seen almost no use of the proprietary stuff. Same for web frameworks, most projects I've seen don't leverage the frameworks nearly as well as they could. This indicates to me that the learning curve is too high and that in practice it's not realistic to expect that people can master and fully utilize proprietary tools in addition to languages, patterns, and other necassary knowledge.

To be fair, I don't work in the Microsoft universe, and it may be a bit more realistic to expect tool buy-in in a world where there's one major tool vendor.

The problem is...

[Anonymous Brave Guy]

...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.

GForge?

[Anonymous Coward]

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

JBuilder

[ricochet81]

Borland's JBuilder 2006 has a pretty neat p2p feature, so you can pass a token around for editing, or watch the editing in follow mode. I found it very helpful and quick. I believe it uses the jabber protocol, and even works with google talk.

A Java mindset?

[peterdaly]

Maybe it's just because I'm a Java programmer, but it seems to me that many of the items in the top 10 list have been considered best practices for quite some time. Examples include 3-tier architecture, datasource management, and Integrated testing.

It's probably actually a good thing that MS is including it. That being said, "it's about time" went throught my mind more than once while reading the article.

-Pete

Channel 9

[ChaserPnk]

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.

Say what you will about the Team System feature

[TheSkepticalOptimist]

But VS is still the best development tool around.

I don't know why some people are complaining about this software, its the best MS has come out with yet. Intellisense in any version takes a big hit on performance, the bottom line is, would you build a house with a hammer or a shoe. I can't understand why anybody would develop software for a living with an underpowered system! Complaints about VS underperforming can easily be resoled by simply upgrading to an Athlon64 or Opteron system.

I've noticed only a few minor usability issues, but these are things that have plagued every release of a VS product, little gaffs which may be annoying, but are infrequent and do not interrupt productivity.

Overall, the environment is much more streamlined, even menu items seemed to be intuitively placed within easy reach for quick access. They finally implemented region support within C++ files, so you can micro manage large classes by separating chunks of related code into sections that can be hidden, and finally outlining preserves its state when you save and reload the file.

When it comes to intellisense, NO OTHER development tool comes close to the speed that VS does. Sure, your CPU usage might spike to 100% for the first few minutes after openning up a project, but a list of class methods and members always pops up instantly when you type a . or -> and text completion is fast. When I was playing around with XCode, I though that it didn't have ANY intellisense like functionality until one day I just happen to notice it took about 10 - 20 seconds for XCODE to show a list of object methods or offer a suggestion for word completion.

The Team collaboration is the buzz word of the day for MS. It is their major focus to get people to upgrade to VS2005. I honestly can't see us using it. Its a small office and we are a pretty tight development team. At most, the Community menu item that appears allows you to bitch to MS about software bugs and feature requests.

But why anybody wouldn't upgrade to 2005 is beyond me. VS2002 was clearly a beta and VS2003 was its patch, but VS2005 is altogether a markedly improved and mature product, finally integrating tight ANSI and ISO C++ standards along with at least recognizing insecure standard library calls and dramatically improved STL support with better debugging support of STL objects. Within the first week, we found numerous minor bugs that could cause the odd random crash in our software simply by compiling the software with VS2005. We also came across multithreading issues due to better optimization of the compiled code allowing for faster program execution that caused race conditions or deadlocks. Something VS2002 or VS6 wasn't making us aware of.

In any regards, if you develop Windows software for a living, not using VS is a detrement. Sure there may be other decent tools if you develop cross platform apps, but using a 3rd party development suite to develop Windows tools only shows your not serious about Windows software development. We are already looking at XAML and Windows Presentation Layer development because we can get the latest beta tools directly from the horses mouth, other development systems are only guessing what XAML will actually become and making a half assed attempt at offering a retail package before Vista is released.

Finally, MS integrated embedded device development in the IDE that allows you to emulate the device virtually, complete with a skin to look like a phone or PDA screen. They have had these tools in some external install, but integration in the IDE is key to getting more and better software written for mobile platforms. I may even get a PocketPC to start learning how to develop for the mobile platform.

Say what you will about MS, Windows, an their other software, but they actually know how to write a decent development platform.

I've been trying to test TFS' SCM capabilities

[pestilence669]

First, the uninstaller is broken. Plan on reformatting before you play with this beast. Also, plan on 2GB+ of RAM. The 1GB minimum is a lie even for a single user. Also, if your source repository is larger than 4GB, you'll need SQL Server 2005. It's demanding on the clients also. Plan on generous RAM & CPU speed.

I can't migrate my company's Visual SourceSafe repository. The built-in analyze tools to repair corruption lock up before they do anything useful. VSS corrupts by nature. Since my repository is trashed and the repair tools are broken, I have no way of importing my source tree... into the less-mature and unreleased (still beta) Team Server.

Keep in mind, TFS's source code management is supposed to be better than VSS... not a replacement for Subversion. That's a big difference to keep note of. My most recent gripe: Rollbacks are sometimes impossible for merges. There is also no help documentation on this product, aside from marketing fluff. Even the docs are in beta.

If Team Foundation Server 1.0 is anything like Visual SourceSafe 1.0, keep your eyes open.

Cost?

[PsychoKiller]

How much does the new suite cost per developer?

Re:Yeah, and splits architects from testers

[Otter]

What kind of organisation does this represent? I guess it reflect's microsoft world view. But it doesnt match that of OSS applications.

Yup, in that scheme Developer gets gcc, CVS and eleven text editors, while Architect and Tester are eliminated in favor of Noisy Fanboy, who just gets a web browser.

One Company

[Prince Vegeta SSJ4]

One company that does it all, One company to find them, One company to bring them all and in the DRM bind them.

Re:I am curious

[Saige]

The new source control system in Team System is much, much better than Visual SourceSafe. Not anywhere even close to that old system.

In fact, I believe that the source control in VSTS is actually based off of the internal source control system that's been in use in Microsoft in a while - similar with the bug/work item tracking portion of VSTS. These two tools already have had significant work and lifetime, just as internal tools so far. So having them as V1 is a little misleading.

The work item tracking system is the best I've used to date. Source control isn't Clearcase, but it's definitely not bad like SourceSafe, and being able to link changesets to bugs and builds and the like is very nice.

(Disclaimer: I am a MS employee and tester on the VSTS team. But I am not now speaking on behalf of MS, and in fact, never do speak on behalf of MS.)

I too am curious

[beuges]

If you've never been involved in working with Visual Sourcesafe, how can you assert with great authority that it 'has been pretty crap for ages'? Were you just hoping for a karma-boost by making an MS-bashing post?

Re:A challenge

[rocjoe71]

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".

Re:A challenge

[Randolpho]

Here's an example of a web service that as a /. geek you've probably heard about:

Google maps API.

Sure, it doesn't use .NET per se, but it's definitely a web service.

And let's not forget the Google Ad Words API. And others, like specialized search services.