Sorting Through the SKUs

Visual Studio 2005 is not one, single product. It in fact comes in many flavors; each is baked for a different appetite. There is a recipe targeted at the hobbyist to the enterprise architect, the beta tester to the operations guyand oh yeah, there are morsels for the developer, too! Microsoft is providing a smorgasbord of tools that invite the entire team to the software development project table.

New members of the team enjoying our favorite IDE means new features to serve their varied needs. For instance, the operations person is concerned about modeling the datacenter, whereas a tester might be concerned about bug counts and expected load. A project manager tends to focus on tracking work items, whereas a developer wants to get some code written. This variety of needs results in multiple groups of features that pertain to a single role on the product life cycleall stuffed into our favorite container: the Visual Studio IDE. Yes, it's getting crowded in here!

Microsoft has done a couple of things to both reduce complexity as well as to serve the new target users. Chief among them was to create multiple versions of the product, each targeted at an individual role on the team. Testers, for example, should not be forced to purchase a Class Designer. The same holds true for architects; they should not have to buy a test case management tool if they do not intend to use it.

Of course, some feature sets will overlap between roles. For example, both testers and developers write unit tests and are concerned with code coverage analysis of the various tests. Microsoft also understands there are those among our ranks who can't stand to not have it all. For them, Microsoft has created Team Suitethe full IDE experience that transcends all roles.

Sorting through all the new Visual Studio flavors can be confusing, for sure. You must understand that the new SKUs are an attempt to target individual roles as well as provide an integrated experience across the development life cycle. The new SKUs can also be seen as a direct response to Microsoft's new competition that sells all of these new features as separate products. We hope the following aids with your Visual Studio flavor selection.

Express Editions

The new Express Editions of the various Microsoft products are low-cost (between free and $50), low-barrier to entry versions targeted directly at the novice, hobbyist, student, or anyone else looking to write some code without breaking the bank. They can also be seen as Microsoft's answer to all the "freeware" tools available to today's developers. After all, if you are a college student looking to put up a buddy's website, you are more likely to look for the low-cost solution. Of course, five years down the road when you're making decisions for your company, Microsoft wants to be sure you've had a chance to work with its products.

The current Express Editions of Visual Studio include all the .NET languages: C#, Visual Basic, J#, and C++. However, each language is a separate downloadable product version. Microsoft has also created an Express version for the new SQL Server 2005 as well as an MSDN Express for providing help content. In addition, the Visual Studio Express Editions include built-in tutorial content/starter kits for developers who are new to the .NET Framework.

These editions purposely do not have all the power of their professional patriarch (such as a Class Designer, unit testing, enterprise templates, XSLT support, source code control, 64-bit support, and so on). In addition, they have a more streamlined user experience that does not expose the full complexity (or power) of the professional editions. However, developers will be able to create client/server form-based applications, websites, and even web services using the Visual Studio Express Editions.

Note

For more information regarding the Visual Studio Express Editions or to download one of these editions, you can visit Microsoft's site at the following URL: http://msdn.microsoft.com/howtobuy/vs2005/editions/stdexp/.

Standard Edition

The Standard version of Visual Studio is the base-level entry point for professional developers. This edition is similar in nature to the Express Editions. However, it contains all the .NET languages in a single package. In addition, it gives developers an expanded feature set over the Express versions. These additional capabilities include the following:

• Ability to target mobile devices

• Ability to work with database design beyond the local SQL Express Edition

• MSDN documentation

• Visual modeling via the visual Class Designer

• Support for XSLT

• Click Once deployment tool

• Consumption (not creation) of external add-ins

• Support for SQL Reporting Services

• Compatibility with Visual Source Safe (VSS)

Visual Studio Professional Edition

Most corporate developers and consultants will find a new home within one of the new Professional editions of Visual Studio. In fact, the product offerings are not that dissimilar to what you're used to with the current incarnations of Visual Studio. When you purchase Visual Studio Professional, you will still get all the language support (including VB, C#, C++, and J#) and, of course, the whole host of new enhancements.

The biggest difference (outside the new features) is how the product is packaged in an MSDN subscription. The first thing you'll notice is a subtle marketing change. Microsoft no longer sells an MSDN subscription that happens to include Visual Studio. Rather, it is now selling Visual Studio Professional with various MSDN flavors; gone are the universal, enterprise, and professional subscriptions. Keeping them around would lead folks to believe there was a one-to-one correlation. Therefore, Microsoft created the following flavors of Visual Studio combined with MSDN (listed from fewest features/applications to the most):

• Visual Studio Professional only (without MSDN) Includes VB, C#, C++, and J#; allows for the creation of windows, web, and mobile applications; provides support for 64-bit development and enterprise templates; includes the Class Designer, the Server Explorer, and SQL developer edition.

• Visual Studio Professional with MSDN Professional Includes all of the above plus the following: support for Excel, Word, and InfoPath projects; includes operating system licenses for development and testing; includes a copy of Virtual PC.

• Visual Studio Professional with MSDN Premium Includes all of the above with the following extras: support for Access development extensions; adds support for modeling with Visio; includes Visual Source Safe; includes server licenses for development and testing; includes a copy of Microsoft Office, InfoPath, OneNote, Visio, Project, and MapPoint.

• Visual Studio Tools for the Microsoft Office System Targeted at developers focused solely on Office automation. Comes in Visual Basic and C# flavors only. Does not include the capability to create mobile application or do 64-bit development.

Note

For more information regarding the Professional editions of Visual Studio, you can visit Microsoft's site at the following URL: http://msdn.microsoft.com/howtobuy/vs2005/editions/pro/.

Visual Studio Team System

Arguably the most exciting (and promising) innovation for Visual Studio 2005 lies within the new team system SKUs. These editions expand the product's focus beyond that of just software developers. Microsoft is now engaging directly with all members of the software life cyclefrom project managers through operations.

Team System is an integrated, software development life cycle platform. The tools surrounding Team System are housed either within the IDE itself or within an Office application (like Project or Excel). Increased project communication and collaboration are at the heart of this platform. To enable a richer experience, Microsoft has created a central server application (backed by SQL Server 2005) that manages and tracks project work items across project roles.

This centralized system, called Team Foundation Server, allows for project-level synchronization among architects, developers, testers, project managers, and operationsall within the tool of their choice. For instance, developers can check out a work item (task) right from the IDE; they can also close that item right there. The same holds true for testers. They can identify an issue and create a new work item. Finally, project managers might choose to view, sort, and report on work items from Excel. They, too, can import, modify, and publish back to the central server from the tool of their choice. The following represents Microsoft's view of the project roles that Team System addresses:

• Architect Software architects are responsible for an application's design. This certainly includes what we traditionally call application design such as classes, inheritance, function signatures, and the like. However, in today's service-oriented/distributed world, this often means the additional complexity of defining the interfaces and connections between discrete bits of application functionality. The modern business application is an amalgamation of other applications and data. For instance, a new application might be created to aggregate data from the order processing system and the customer relationship management system to provide a holistic view of corporate sales data.

  An architect's job doesn't end there. He or she must ensure the design will work within the confines of the datacenter. This includes verifying the application against current hardware, firewall rules, service packs, software versions, and so on. After all, who wants to spend four months creating an application only to be told by the infrastructure team that it does not fit within the deployment environment? Rather, the architect should be able to visually verify new distributed systems against a logical version of the datacenter.

• Developer Developers make it all happen. They are responsible for building the application and writing the code that makes the magic happen. Microsoft understands and is trying to address our plight: We want to be free to write code that conforms to best practices. However, these practices are often a moving targetand there always seem to be more and more practices, patterns, and blocks. Team System is meant to help developers write secure and reliable code and ensure it all gets tested.

• Tester Testers play a vital role in ensuring the overall quality of the project when it gets delivered to the end user. We all know that they typically get crunched when it comes to project time. Builds are not always ready. Features are still sneaking in. Team System wants to help make sure testers can get as much real testing done in the time they are given. The product understands that testers need to create test cases, write tests, execute tests, log and verify issues against code, and report code coverage and status information.

• Project Manager Project managers (PMs) need to be able to orchestrate the entire team's effort. They are responsible for tracking actual progress against baseline plans. They often need to be able to collect work item status from multiple team members and allocate precious resources accordingly. Of course, most PMs don't use Visual Studio. Rather, their tool of choice is often Microsoft Project or Excel. The good news is that Team System ensures up-to-the-minute project task item tracking from the tool of choice.

• Operations Operations want to make sure that what the folks in application development create can be deployed within the bounds of the organization. There is nothing worse than spending a few months on a hot new project only to find out during deployment that your architecture is not supported on the target servers. Perhaps you are using a newer version of the .NET Framework that has not been approved for production, or perhaps your application communicates directly to the database that is not allowed in the production setup.

  Visual Studio Team Architect allows an architect to work with the operations person to define a logical representation of the datacenter environment. This includes typical server installs, communication between zones, and so on. This logical design can be controlled via versioning and digital signing. The architect can then work to verify the intended architecture against the logical datacenter. A compiler checks for inconsistencies and reports "errors" back to the architectat design time, not during the final stage of production deployment.

The Server

Visual Studio Team Foundation Server is the core of Visual Studio Team System. This product is deployed onto a central server for the entire team to access. The result is a centralized, holistic management of the projecteven across a distributed team.

Note

Microsoft's original announcement surrounding Team Foundation Server indicated that all development teams would have to come up with cash for this server SKU in addition to purchasing individual clients. Microsoft held down the entry cost for the product, but a lot of small development shops still balked at not being able to participate in this full life cycle tool.

Microsoft heard and listened to a very important segment of its customer base. It decided to ship a five-user license for the server with each team client SKU. This will certainly help small development shops, spread some good PR, and help Microsoft ensure a widespread adoption of Visual Studio Team Foundation Server. Of course, despite pricing, Visual Studio Team Foundation Server was created for large, enterprise-scope development projects.

The functionality behind Team Foundation Server revolves around project management and source control. Project management and tracking are accomplished through work items. A work item can be a task on the project, an issue or bug, a software requirement, a feature, or a test scenario. In general a work item represents a generic unit of work on the project. Of course, work items are customizable and can have states, new fields, and business rules associated with them. Work items can also be driven by a methodology. Finally, work items play a central part in ensuring project team communication and reporting.

The source control features in Team Foundation Server complete the elevation of the entire Microsoft development product platform to a professional level. Development teams are no longer forced to live with the limitations of the previous incarnations of Visual Source Safe. You now are not required to go out and purchase a third-party source control system and live with its limited Visual Studio integration issues. Instead, Team Foundation Server brings you such enterprise class features as change sets, shelving, automatic build rules, the capability to associate work items to changed source, parallel development, a source control policy engine, branching, checkpoints, and more. And like the rest of Team Foundation Server, it is all extensible.

Surrounding these project management and source control features are a build management engine, a reporting infrastructure, and a project portal. The build tools allow for both automatic, scheduled builds as well as on-demand builds. Builds are reported against, documented, automatically tested, and analyzed for code coverage and churn, for example. The reporting engine and project portal combine to further enhance the view into the project by team members. Built on Windows SharePoint Services (WSS), it delivers the latest test and build reports, documentation, announcements, and quality analysis.

Note

Visual Studio Team Foundation Server ships with a new source control system based on SQL Server. For smaller development shops that need source control, a new version of Visual Source Safe fixes some of the issues that have plagued this product, including the lack of remote access capabilities. Thanks to new web service integration, remote access is now much more responsive.

The Client Tools

A number of new client versions of the Visual Studio toolset are used to access the foundation server. Each version includes a copy of Visual Studio 2005 Professional with the Class Designer and a license for Team Foundation Server. In addition, purchasing with MSDN premium will give you copies of the operating systems for development and testing, copies of Windows server for the same, Microsoft Office, Visio, Project, and MapPoint. What makes each of these SKUs unique and significant, however, is what additional goodies they do and do not contain. The intent is a targeted set of tools to a different role on the project. The following list outlines the features that drive these SKUs into their respective buckets:

• Visual Studio Team Developer The SKU most likely to take hold with current VS developers, this product includes static code analysis, code profiling, dynamic code analysis, unit testing, and code coverage indicators.

• Visual Studio Team Architect Designed for the software architect, this SKU improves design and design validation of distributed systems. Features include the first round of tools targeting the system definition model (SDM): SOA modeling tools, Distributed System Designer, Application Designer, and a Deployment Designer. Note: This version does not contain the team system features targeted at developers or testers.

• Visual Studio Team Test Targeted at the software tester, this edition includes the ability to create unit tests, do code coverage analysis, manage and create test cases, and execute load tests. Purchasing MSDN Premium with the Team Test version gives testers a copy of Virtual Server to allow for deployment-testing scenarios.

• Visual Studio Team Suite For those who must have it all (and have unlimited budgets), this SKU is the everything-but-the-kitchen-sink option. It includes all the features of Team Architect, Developer, and Test in a single package.

Note

To further compare the Visual Studio Team System SKUs and get up-to-date information on Microsoft's product bundling, you can visit Microsoft's site at http://msdn.microsoft.com/howtobuy/vs2005/editions/team/compare/.