Roughly 18 months after IBM acquired Rational, the leading provider of application life-cycle tools, Microsoft has announced its own suite of tools for application modeling, project scheduling, and team development. Visual Studio Team System (VSTS) will be part of Visual Studio 2005 (code-named Whidbey).

IBM's Dec. 2002 acquisition of Rational, on whom Microsoft had relied for application life-cycle tools, led many customers to believe that Rational would place more emphasis on WebSphere and Linux rather than on Visual Studio and the .NET Framework. Although the VSTS features are not as comprehensive as Rational’s offerings, they do address the team development features that are most commonly used by all developers. In addition, they mark a significant change in Microsoft’s tools strategy, which has focused on the core "compile-edit-debug" portion of the development cycle and left the remaining parts to partners.

Focus on Team Development, Modeling

The major components of VSTS help developers with the following tasks:

Team development. VSTS will include a new source-code control, bug, and work-item tracking system based on ASP.NET and SQL Server. Visual SourceSafe, Microsoft’s current source control product, will continue to be supported but is unlikely to be significantly enhanced. Some VSTS features are based on internally developed tools that Microsoft uses itself.

Modeling. VSTS will include modeling tools for application architects to describe the services that make up a distributed, service-oriented application prior to writing any code. The tools then generate the appropriate code and schema required to implement the model. VSTS also synchronizes the code and schema with the model so that the code reflects changes to the model.

Code analysis. VSTS will integrate several code analysis tools: PREfast, used internally as part of Microsoft’s security efforts, analyzes C and C++ source code for a variety of security defects, including buffer overruns and memory leaks; FxCop, previously available for download, analyzes managed code for conformance with a set of programmer’s guidelines developed by Microsoft. In addition, VSTS will include new analysis tools to help developers maximize application performance.

Testing. VSTS includes a set of testing tools, including support for load-testing Web applications. These testing tools are integrated with the rest of VSTS so that test results can be coordinated with the bug database.

MSDN subscribers can download a prerelease version of Visual Studio 2005, including Team System from msdn.microsoft.com. The final version is expected in the first half of 2005.

The Visual Studio 2005 Team System home page is msdn.microsoft.com/vstudio/teamsystem/default.aspx.