Goodbye Team System. We Hardly Knew Ye.

By: David Starr Category:UncategorizedTag: Team System:

Visual Studio 2010 Beta 2 is available on MSDN this morning. It will be more widely available soon. With a new look and feel it is off an running. After working with it for awhile, I can honestly report that it is a pleasurable product to use. Much attention has been paid to aesthetic, and the customization story for products like ReSharper and Code Rush is even richer. This means that companies have a great platform upon which to make our favorite development environment dance.

One change we see as part of the Beta 2 drop is the exclusion of the term “Team System”.

That’s right! Team System is no longer going to be used as a product name going forward, even though all the favorite tools are still in the box. So, what’s going on here?

We’ve been struggling with the following product lineup for several years now:

Visual Studio Professional 2008 with MSDN Premium
Visual Studio Team System 2008 Development Edition with MSDN Premium
Visual Studio Team System 2008 Architecture Edition with MSDN Premium
Visual Studio Team System 2008 Test Edition with MSDN Premium
Visual Studio Team System 2008 Database Edition with MSDN Premium

There’s a mouth full, eh? Not so funnily enough, the more frequent questions I get from customers investigating Team System has been around licensing. Frankly, it is confusing. MSFT heard this loud and clear and has taken steps to rectify the situation with this release. Instead of continuing with the Team System brand, we’ll now be talking about fewer and simpler options for purchasing Microsoft tools.

Visual Studio 2010 Professional
Visual Studio 2010 Premium
Visual Studio 2010 Ultimate

OK, so fewer choices must be simpler, so what do I buy now? Well, this page shows the various tools available in the different versions. The truth is that there is still a decision process around what tools you want to pay for. Let’s take a look at just the testing tools available in Visual Studio.

	VS 2010 Professional with MSDN	VS 2010 Premium with MSDN	VS 2010 Ultimate with MSDN
Unit Testing (MS Test)	X	X	X
Code Coverage		X	X
Test Impact Analysis		X	X
Coded UI Test		X	X
Web Performance Testing			X
Load Testing			X

If I want Code Coverage, I buy Premium. If I want Load Testing, I buy Ultimate.

Hopefully this packaging will actually be easier to understand and digest.

7 thoughts on “Goodbye Team System. We Hardly Knew Ye.”

Will code coverage offer more or better coverage than TestDriven.Net offers?

More or better…

Well, Honestly I am not 100% familiar with NCover, but I think you are referring to NCover. TestDriven has hooks for that.

I haven’t played with 2010 Code Coverage yet. I’ll blog it when I do!

yay! One of the dumbest things I saw with VSTS, an “Architect” version that wasn’t configured to run MS Test. Great, so our “Architect” can check in source code without the nuisance of running those pesky unit tests. 🙂