Q&A: Doug Seven on Visual Studio Team System 2010

Microsoft Senior Product Manager Doug Seven talks about the next version of VSTS.

• By Michael Desmond
• 07/01/2009

Microsoft has worked feverishly to advance the group-focused capabilities of its Visual Studio Team System line. Microsoft Senior Product Manager Doug Seven discusses what .NET developers can expect from Visual Studio Team System 2010 and how they can best adapt to the latest release.

What are some best practices for moving from TFS 2005 to TFS 2010? What will this mean for my other apps, like SharePoint?
Microsoft Visual Studio Team Foundation Server 2010 will support both an in-place upgrade, and an upgrade to new hardware. For an in-place upgrade you will need to ensure you have SQL Server 2008 installed. If you are using an older version if SQL Server, you will need to upgrade it first. After that you will be able to upgrade Team Foundation Server on the same machine.

For an upgrade that involves moving to new hardware, you will need to back-up the Team Foundation Server and Windows SharePoint Services databases from the existing installation. On the new hardware you will need to install SQL Server 2008 and then restore the databases. After that you will install Windows SharePoint Services 3.0 SP1 and configure it with the existing databases. Finally, install Team Foundation Server 2010 and configure with the Upgrade Wizard to use the existing TFS databases.

Are the UML tools available outside of VSTS 2010 Architecture Edition?
The new UML tools for Use Case, Activity and Sequence diagramming are only available in Visual Studio Team System 2010. In Visual Studio Team Architecture 2010 you will have full authoring capabilities. All of the other Team System products will have view-only capabilities.

How do you decide which features are Team System features? It seems that a lot of the new debugging/test functionality would benefit all developers.
The decision making process regarding what features will ship in which products is complex. We look at what capabilities are needed for an individual developer to build software versus the capabilities typically needed when projects and organizations get bigger and/or more complex. The features in the Team System product line are targeted at developers working within teams dealing with the challenges of bigger and/or more complex projects and organizations.

What new functionality is available for Agile processes and Test Driven Development? Is this only available in VSTS 2010?
In Visual Studio Team System 2010 we are making some terrific improvements for development teams leveraging Agile methodologies and practices. These include better planning tools, such as our new Agile planning workbooks using Microsoft Office Excel, and reporting improvements targeted at Agile teams. For developers practicing test-driven development we have added generate-from-usage support. This enables Test Driven Development practitioners to define new classes in their tests, and generate those class stubs from a context menu.

What’s the difference between the "Olso" modeling platform and the DSL Toolkit and runtime in the VS 2010 SDK?
The DSL toolkit allows developers to define domain specific languages that surface inside Visual Studio. Oslo extends the ideas of the DSL toolkit allowing developers to define both visual and textual DSLs to a broader set of audiences.

Reader Question
My main concern with the next version of VS (VSTS, TFS) and the next version of SharePoint is the lack of guidance for organizations like mine that have both MOSS and TFS. Can they be integrated to minimize duplication of services? Can their infrastructure be integrated to so that a MOSS farm and TFS farm reliably share hardware and services in our operations infrastructure?

Although I know SharePoint dev will be more integrated into VS2010, when do we get to the point where TFS and MOSS become a more cohesive enterprise suite, similar to what is happening with PerformancePoint and MOSS? There are so many obvious integration points that currently rely on our organization making use of CodePlex or custom API development or custom processes in order to use them. (e.g. exposing work items in MOSS, using MOSS search across TFS projects, etc.) Can we hope that SharePoint integration into VS will begin to produce some common 'best practices' for SP development?

In Visual Studio Team System 2010 we have improved our integration with SharePoint, including giving you the ability to leverage your MOSS installation for hosting the Team Portal that is part of your Team Foundation Server Team Project. Additionally we are adding integration allowing you to leverage Excel Services in MOSS to create rich dashboards that expose data from your Team Foundation Server operational store and data warehouse.