Microsoft is refreshing the beta release of its Visual Studio 2005 developer tool platform to feature the full range of technologies planned for the company's Team System application life cycle management system, Microsoft representatives acknowledged on Friday.
Already available to subscribers on MSDN, Microsoft plans to provide Visual Studio 2005 Beta refresh with the Team System to developers at the VSLive conference in Orlando next month and at other shows as well.
"It's the first time customers will have been able to see the whole Team System, and we're hoping to get a lot of feedback," said Prashant Sridharan, lead product manager for enterprise tools at Microsoft. He cautioned, however, that the product still is in beta release and thus has issues with performance and stability.
Visual Studio 2005 Team System is to feature the four components of Team System plus the Professional Edition of Visual Studio 2005. Those four components include three client products, which are Team Architect, for modeling; Team Developer Edition, for performance and code analyses; and Team Test Edition, for load testing. A fourth component, for servers, is Team Foundation, which offers source code control, item tracking, project management, and integration with Microsoft Project and Word.
A previous beta of Visual Studio included only modeling components from Team System. The general release of Visual Studio Team System is expected to ship in the first half of 2005.
Microsoft with its application life cycle platform expects to compete against offerings such as the upcoming release of the IBM Rational "Atlantic" tools platform and Borland Software's CalibreRM application life cycle management package. But Borland will both compete with and work with Microsoft, Sridharan said.
