Mehran Nikoo's Notes

VSTS Development and Database Products To Be Unified

As promised in my earlier post, I am going to highlight the announcement we made in regards to the VSTS product licensing.

In VSTS 2005 and VSTS 2008, we had different SKUs for Development and Database editions so if you wanted to use both, you had to go for the Team Suite, which would cost a lot, especially if you wanted to extend this to the whole development team. So this is another case where the product marketing team have listened to the customers and have decided to provide a cost effective solution to the customers' needs. So how does it work?

Starting with VSTS 2010, VSTS Development and Database products will be unified into a single product so you will get the features available in both products. And what about those customers who own VSTS 2008 licenses? As a benefit to the existing Software Assurance (SA) customers, those who currently own VSTS 2008 Development Edition or VSTS 2008 Database Edition will receive all of the following products through their MSDN subscription, for free:

• Visual Studio Team System 2008 Development Edition
• Visual Studio Team System 2008 Database Edition
• Visual Studio 2005 Team System for Software Developers
• Visual Studio 2005 Team System for Database Professionals

There is a catch though... you will have to wait until 1st of October 2008, which is... let me see... around 30 hours away!

Souce: Microsoft Press Release - Microsoft Unveils Next Version of Visual Studio and .NET Framework

Enjoy :)

Update: This FAQ page has more information on the unification of these products. It is good to know that this change also applies to those VSTS Development Edition licenses that (Gold) Certified Partners with Custom Development Solutions and ISV competencies receive as part of their partnership benefits.

Announcing Visual Studio 2010 and .NET Framework 4.0

Earlier today, we announced the next wave of developer products and tools, namely Visual Studio 2010 and .NET Framework 4.0. Both of these products are major releases that bring new concepts and paradigms to the software development and introduce new first class citizens to the Visual Studio environment. The result will be an ever higher productivity for the development teams and lower barrier to entry for developing applications for various products and technologies we offer today and will ship within the next few years.

The focus of the first annoncement is on VSTS 2010 (code-named "Rosario") and the improvements to the ALM process. My favourite enhancements are:

• Visualisation tools for change tracking across branches and merging into the production build
• Workflow-based builds, which allow the errors to be caught before they impact other team members (great news for those who have been buying coffee for their team mates!)
• Built-in support for UML and DSL in the IDE (just in case you missed the news, Microsoft announced its membership in the OMG earlier in September)
• Support for hierarchical work items in TFS

This is not an exhaustive list but these are the items that caught my eyes as I was reading the announcement. There is also a (good!) change in the product licensing for VSTS, which is great news for the development teams. Since I don't want you to miss this announcement, I am going to write a separate post on this subject.

As you can imagine, there are loads of more features to come with Visual Studio 2010 and .NET Framework 4.0. If you are going to the PDC, you will be lucky enough to hear about it all the time but if you aren't, make sure you follow the news on the blogosphere and the PDC official web site.

Additional resources:
- VSTS 2010 on Channel9
- VSTS 2010 and .NET Framework 4.0 Overview on MSDN