Visual Studio 2005 Team System

Visual Studio 2005 Team System

Team System is more than an edition of Visual Studio. It is actually a series of role-based editions. Team System is not really intended for solo professionals or consultants. Its value is realized for teams that include project manager, architect, developer, and tester roles. If, as an individual, you wear all these hats, then you might want to get your hands on it as well.

NOTE
Team System is optimized for teams of 5 scaling to 500 active members.

Visual Studio 2005 Team Edition for Software Architects

This edition is specifically designed for both the infrastructure and application architect roles. It includes visual designers, referred to as the distributed application designers or service-oriented architecture (SOA) designers. The architect can create diagrams to represent the logical datacenter, the application, application systems, and the deployment of the application. These designers follow a simple drag, drop, and connect heuristic that has long been popular with Visual Studio. More than just pretty shapes, the diagrams have intelligence and metadata that can be validated against well-known and custom-defined constraints, and then turned into code with a quick click. Behind the scenes of these elegant diagrams, Microsoft is persisting the information in System Definition Model (SDM) files, which are implementations of Dynamic Systems Initiative (DSI).

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You'll learn more about Team Edition for Architects in Chapter 5.

Visual Studio 2005 Team Edition for Software Developers

This is the edition for the developers or programmers on the team. This will probably be the most common of the Team System role-based editions. In addition to all of the base Visual Studio 2005 professional features, developers will get the static code analyzer (akin to FxCop), unit testing (akin to NUnit), code coverage, and code profiler. Some of these features are shared with the Visual Studio 2005 Team Edition for Software Testers. Microsoft knows that it is hard to determine which role (developer or tester) should be in charge of writing and running these source code tests, so it provided them in both editions.

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You'll learn more about Team Edition for Developers in Chapter 6.

Visual Studio 2005 Team Edition for Software Testers

Whether a team member is a developer or exclusively a tester, this edition will provide access to all the coverage, quality, and load-testing facilities needed to thoroughly test a project, ensuring that it works from all angles. The Team Edition for Testers includes load Web testing (akin to the Application Center Test), Unit Testing, Code Coverage, as well as test-case management tools for managing all the tests and running and monitoring them from a centralized area. The ability to plug in whatever manual tests you might have is also supported in Team Edition for Testers. Some of these tests are shared with Team Edition for Developers.

More Info
You'll learn more about Team Edition for Testers in Chapter 7.

Visual Studio 2005 Team Foundation Server

This edition of Visual Studio will provide many back-end databases and Web services to enable the team to collaborate, by sharing work items, source code, builds, and other artifacts. If you intend to run Team System for a team, as it is advertised, you'll need this product to connect all your team members together. Team Foundation Server is more than just an “edition” of Visual Studio 2005 Team System. It's the engine behind your software development life cycle.

Team Foundation Server includes a standalone client called Team Explorer. This client is essentially a lightweight edition of Visual Studio 2005 that offers an alternate way—besides using one of the other Visual Studio editions, Excel, or Project—of creating and managing work items. It's intended for the “casual stakeholder”: the person on your team who has to check in documentation, manage images for a Web project, and so on.

More Info
You'll learn more about Team Foundation Server in Chapter 2, and you'll learn more about the various clients in Chapter 3.

Visual Studio 2005 Team Suite

For the team member who plays more than one role, or for the consultant who plays all the roles, there's the Team Suite. Microsoft has wrapped up all three role-based editions (architect, developer, and tester) into a single edition for simplicity.

NOTE
When Visual Studio 2005 launches, MSDN® Universal and MSDN Enterprise will no longer be available for purchase. At that time, active MSDN Universal subscribers will be offered an upgrade to MSDN Premium Subscription and their choice of Visual Studio 2005 Team Edition for Software Architects, Visual Studio 2005 Team Edition for Software Developers, or Visual Studio 2005 Team Edition for Software Testers at no additional cost. For those that want each of the Visual Studio Team System role-based editions, special pricing will enable MSDN Universal subscribers to upgrade to Visual Studio 2005 Team Suite. Check the Team System Web site on MSDN for the latest information and updates.