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Put the Team in Lifecycle Management
Microsoft's enterprise version of Visual Studio 2005 stresses team development.
by Patrick Meader

Tech•Ed, May 24, 2004

Emphasizing improved collaboration between development and IT operations teams for lifecycle management, Microsoft announced at Tech•Ed today the enterprise version of its upcoming programming suite, Visual Studio 2005 (code-named Whidbey). Called Visual Studio Team System, the enterprise version of VS 2005 incorporates a range of lifecycle management tools and team-oriented features intended to reduce the time and cost of developing enterprise-scale applications, as well as facilitate the creation of applications based on service-oriented architectures (SOAs).

Microsoft is building its enterprise lifecycle features around three versions of the tool that it calls Team Architect, Team Developer, and Team Test. The team management features are collectively called Team Foundation and include tools that focus on change management, reporting, work-item tracking, and project management.

Visual Studio Team System expands considerably the lifecycle management tools provided out of the box by Visual Studio. The tools that comprise Team Architect, a trio of designers for modeling and implementing applications, have been publicly discussed by Microsoft previously. Code-named Whitehorse (see "Whitehorse Rides to Modeling's Rescue," in Resources), these designers consist of a distributed application designer that provides whiteboard-style application design, WSE support, and the ability to validate your application design against your logical infrastructure; a logical infrastructure designer that lets you take a snapshot of your existing environment and enforce the proper settings and constraints for a large-scale deployment in a variety of settings; and a class designer that enables code modeling, generation, and two-way synchronization between a project's code and its underlying model.

Note that this class designer does not depend on UML, but instead relies on a new notation developed by Microsoft, which asserts that a new approach was necessary to achieve two-way application design (see "Build Distributed Apps a New Way" and "Model Apps More Effectively" in Resources). Visio will still be part of the Visual Studio package and will maintain support for UML-based modeling, but that might be for legacy support more than any other factor. Visual Studio itself is headed in a different direction.

One of the main goals of this trio of designers is to help people involved in different parts of the application creation process to work together more seamlessly. Architects can lay down the design of an application for the developers, whose own changes to the model are reflected back when they make changes as they code the application. Similarly, developers are connected more closely to the IT people who deploy and maintain the application by being able to validate whether an application can deploy in a given environment before the deployment is ever attempted.