Over the past two weeks, I’ve really been hitting VS & TFS 2010 Beta 2 pretty hard.  I’ve found a few things and used Connect to report some suggestions & problems that I’ve found.  The product teams have been very active about responding to each of them and it’s been a very pleasant experience.

It looks like the product team wants even more feedback from everyone so if you could head over to the 2010 Beta 2 Survey and give your feedback, I know it will be greatly appreciated.  It’s pretty quick and easy with about 11 questions and about 3 optional free-fill questions that you can type longer responses in.

Ed Blankenship

I get this question a lot.  People often wonder what Team Foundation Server (TFS) is and why would you use it?  I read a blog post earlier today from Jason Zander who has the best explanation of TFS that I know.  Also, he hits the nail on the head about the “well, can’t I just integrate all these other systems together?”  I love the analogy he uses (emphasis added:)

First let’s talk about “why TFS?”  The goal of Team Foundation Server is to create a central repository with a set of tools that make it really easy to collaborate between roles.  You could try to stitch together multiple disparate systems as follows:

In this case each system has its own storage, own set of identity for assets, own commands and tools.  Getting this going is like trying to hook up a set of custom stereo components:  you can pull it off but it’s going to be a lot of work and you are missing out on some stuff.

What I’d rather have is a system which can integrate these items together and then enable my default work flow through the system:

Even better, with TFS 2010 you get the opportunity to add even more pieces to the ALM puzzle under one roof:

A good Application Lifecycle Management (ALM) system has all of these systems integrated together and linked to provide you as much transparency, traceability, and metrics available about the relationships between the artifacts in those systems.  TFS is the best system available today that has all of that built together.

Ed Blankenship

If you missed the news on Monday, Visual Studio 2010 and Team Foundation Server 2010 Beta 2 are available to download by both MSDN Subscribers and everyone else in the world!  This is really huge!  Beta 2 has already been a really solid release since I first downloaded and installed it.  The performance of the new WPF-based IDE has been dramatically improved from earlier builds.

Visual Studio

• Visual Studio 2010 Ultimate (.ISO)
• Visual Studio 2010 Premium (.ISO)
• Visual Studio 2010 Professional (.ISO)

Visual Studio Extensibility

• Visual Studio 2010 SDK (.EXE)

.NET Framework

• .NET Framework 4 (redistributable .EXE)
• .NET Framework 4 Client Profile (redistributable .EXE)

Team Foundation Server

• Visual Studio Team Foundation Server (.ISO)
• Visual Studio Team Explorer (.ISO)

Test Products

• Visual Studio Test Elements (.ISO)
• Visual Studio Team Lab Management
• Visual Studio Team Agents (.ISO)

Express

• Visual Basic Express (.EXE)
• Visual C++ Express (.EXE)
• Visual C# Express (.EXE)
• Visual Web Developer Express (.EXE)
• Express Combo DVD (.ISO) (includes all four Express installs)

There was also a ton of news coming out ranging from Licensing and SKU changes, the launch data for the 2010 release (which is March 22, 2010,) what you get upgraded to if you have an active MSDN Subscription on a launch day, and a whole bunch of great things!  I’m really excited about this 2010 release wave.  There’s a ton of great stuff designed to make everyone’s life that much easier when they’re developing, testing, and building applications.

“Go-Live” License

One of the great things about the Beta 2 release is that Microsoft has announced that you can use Beta 2 in production environments and also to build production applications.  This “go-live” license includes .NET 4.0, Visual Studio 2010, and Team Foundation Server 2010.  Jeff Beehler blogged earlier about what “go-live” actually means so be sure to read through it closely.  Beta 2 is a very solid Visual Studio and TFS build.  However, there is always some risk with upgrading production environments using Beta software.  Be sure you understand the risks before taking the plunge. 

I’d suggest that if you are able to take the risk that you upgrade to both Visual Studio 2010 and TFS 2010 Beta 2 as soon as you can.  Remember that even if you don’t want to run .NET 4 for your production applications, you can still use Visual Studio 2010 to edit solutions/projects that target .NET 3.5, .NET 3.0, and .NET 2.0!

If you’re not able to take the risk to “go-live” during the Beta 2 timeframe then I would definitely suggest that you begin you testing & evaluation process now using the Beta 2 build.  You’re able to test out the upgrade process from your TFS 2008 databases and discover any possible hang-ups during the upgrade process. (I personally haven’t had any for the servers that I have upgraded but you never know!)  By getting your planning & testing done now, you’re in a better position to upgrade when TFS 2010 is released at the beginning of the year.  Another thing you could do to get ready is be sure that you’ve upgraded any prerequisites.  For example, even while you are running TFS 2008 you can upgrade your SQL Server instance to 2008 and upgrade your Windows SharePoint Services install to WSS 3.0.  Using SQL Server 2005 or WSS 2.0 is not supported in TFS 2010 so this will just make things a ton easier for you when it actually is time to upgrade.

Launch Date vs RTM

I mentioned about that the launch date was announced for March 22, 2010.  However, launch doesn’t necessarily mean Release to Manufacturing (RTM.)  Products usually RTM before launch day but there have been a few exceptions.  For example, SQL Server 2008 RTM’d much later than it’s launch date :)  Hopefully that never happens again.  What’s great about RTM is that if you’re an active MSDN subscriber, you usually get access to download the final build shortly after RTM based on past releases of products.  Launch day for Windows 7 is tomorrow but RTM was earlier this summer and MSDN Subscribers have had access since August 6, 2009.  (This does not mean in any way that there will be that much lead time for the Visual Studio 2010 release… I’d say it’s probably very unlikely!)

There’s really a lot of news to process so I’ll be posting some articles next week that goes into detail about several of them.  If there’s anything in particular that you’re not quite sure of, feel free to contact me or leave me a comment about something that needs more information.  In the meantime, please do help out by making this the best Visual Studio release ever.  If you find a bug or think a scenario could be improved (be reasonable) be sure to log it at the Microsoft Connect site.

Take care and have fun,

Ed Blankenship