Chapter 18. Future Build Tools from Microsoft

Philosophy: 2/10 rule: When people evaluate and discuss new technologies, they always overestimate what will be feasible in the next 2 years and underestimate what will happen in the next 10.

CIO Rob Carter of FedEx

InfoWorld: Rob Carter named one of six "chief technology officers of the year" (February 2002).

As of this writing, Microsoft plans to release an onslaught of new developer tools. We have all but declared war on the current leaders in this configuration management industry. Microsoft has always made it a top priority to listen to what customers want, and this release of developer tools is just another example of delivering on feedback. Software developers have been asking for better tools from Microsoft for years. The delay in getting these tools developed and released is a result of the lack of resources because the focus at Microsoft has been on .NET and security. But now, the Visual Studio team is laser-beam focused on delivering the best products in this developer tools or SCM category.

The following list of "what we've heard from our customers about the software life cycle" is taken from a presentation given by Ajay Sudan, the technical product manager for Visual Studio Team System (VSTS), at VSLive on February 7, 2005:

• "Building software today is very difficult."

• "My team is spread out and specialized."

• "Tools today don't work well together."

• "I need to be able to predict the success of my projects."

• "My organization needs customizable process guidance."

I hope that the previous chapters in this book have addressed the preceding concerns. The tools that we ship help automate, or automagic, the processes that I have outlined. Some important testing and design tools are available, too, but those are advanced topics that can be added only when a good core build process is in place.

In this chapter, I want to touch on the products that are coming out (or that have just been released) that will be helpful to every software development team. This is not intended to be a comprehensive view of these new products, though. Because this book will be released before the products, there might be some changes that I am not able to catch. To address this, I have included links to each topic that point to a site where data is kept up to date.

There's one last thing I would like to point out, as I did in Chapter 5, "Build Tools and Technologies," and it's that everything mentioned in this chapter is just a tool. Consider tools as a means of making your job easier, not of doing your job for you. Do not look at a tool to be the answer to all your problems. Many groups purchase tools and keep adding them to their process. I call this applying band-aids without even looking at what is causing the bleeding. As you can imagine, eventually the band-aids break or there are so many of them that the whole process is doomed. A better analogy would be that adding tools to solve problems is like patching a boat with a weak structure and exterior shell and then taking it out to the ocean. It'll eventually sink. Hopefully there will be enough life boats for everyone (hint: Titanic reference again).