Microsoft announced today the purchase of Teamprise Client Suite, from Teamprise.

Teamprise is a division of SourceGear and it’s main focus is creating products and solutions for enterprise companies standardizing on Microsoft Visual Studio Team System and Team Foundation Server. SourceGear’s most popular product is SourceOffSite. You have probably already heard of it.

Teamprise Client Suite consists of 3 components:

Eclipse plugin – Allows developers to perform all of their source control, bug tracking, build, and reporting operations from within Eclipse and Eclipse-based IDEs, such as Rational Application Developer, JBoss, BEA Workshop, and Adobe Flex Builder. It integrates into the menu system of Eclipse as a standard Team Provider plug-in, but also provides developers with specific views and forms for interacting with the Team Foundation Server. Developers using the Teamprise Plug-in for Eclipse have the ability to take part in the entire software development process in use by their organization without leaving the comforts of their development environment.

Stand-alone Explorer – Combines all of the functionality available to Eclipse developers using the Teamprise Plug-in into a stand-alone, cross-platform GUI application for team members working outside of a development IDE. Perform source control operations, browse the Team Foundation Server repository, edit bug reports, run work item queries, monitor builds, and view project reports all from within an application that has a native look and feel on the operating system you are using.

Command line client – Provides a cross-platform, non-graphical interface to Microsoft’s Team Foundation Server, for scripting and build scenarios or for developers who prefer a command-line interface. The command line interface is compatible with the current Microsoft supplied command line interface so scripts are interchangeable. All of these components work on Windows, Mac, Linux and several flavors of Unix. In addition work is being done to explore providing these capabilities in mainframe environments to enable access to the Visual Studio ALM platform from there as well.

Some time ago I compiled a list of some of the most useful webcasts and articles regarding the basic tasks of Team Foundation Server 2008. Most of them are from TeamSystemRocks, witch is an excellent resource in terms of this technology. So I thought of leaving them here as a reference:

Webcasts

Visual Studio team System Webcast

VisualStudioTeamSystem2008_5F00_TFSWebcast.wmv

Using Team Explorer Webcast

http://teamsystemrocks.com/media/p/1800.aspx

Using Team Foundation Server Command Line Tools

http://teamsystemrocks.com/media/p/1799.aspx

Understanding VSTS Reports

http://teamsystemrocks.com/media/p/1798.aspx

Project Metrics Data Warehouse

http://teamsystemrocks.com/media/p/1797.aspx

Navigating The VSTF project Portal

http://teamsystemrocks.com/media/p/1796.aspx

MSF Agile Project Template

http://teamsystemrocks.com/media/p/1795.aspx

Microsoft Project Integration

http://teamsystemrocks.com/media/p/1794.aspx

Microsoft Excel Integration

http://teamsystemrocks.com/media/p/1793.aspx

Enforcing and Customizing Check-in Policies

http://teamsystemrocks.com/media/p/1792.aspx

Customizing Work Items

http://teamsystemrocks.com/media/p/1791.aspx

Customizing The Build process with Team Build

http://teamsystemrocks.com/media/p/1790.aspx

Customizing Process templates

http://teamsystemrocks.com/media/p/1789.aspx

Creating Custom Reports in VSTS

http://teamsystemrocks.com/media/p/1788.aspx

Configuring Team Foundation Server Notifications

http://teamsystemrocks.com/media/p/1787.aspx

Automating Nightly Builds With Team Build

http://teamsystemrocks.com/media/p/1786.aspx

Intro to Version Control – Workspaces

http://teamsystemrocks.com/media/p/1785.aspx

Intro to Version Control – Shelving

http://teamsystemrocks.com/media/p/1784.aspx

Intro to Version Control – Diffing

http://teamsystemrocks.com/media/p/1783.aspx

Intro to Version Control – Checkin Checkout

http://teamsystemrocks.com/media/p/1782.aspx

Intro to Version Control – Changesets

http://teamsystemrocks.com/media/p/1781.aspx

Intro to Version Control – Branching

http://teamsystemrocks.com/media/p/1780.aspx

Other Webcasts

Using the System Designer to create composable systems

http://teamsystemrocks.com/media/p/1779.aspx

Importing the IIS Settings to the Distributed System Designers

http://teamsystemrocks.com/media/p/1778.aspx

Extending the distributed System Designers using the SDM SDK

http://teamsystemrocks.com/media/p/1777.aspx

Designing a logical Datacenter

http://teamsystemrocks.com/media/p/1776.aspx

Designing a distributed application using the application designer

http://teamsystemrocks.com/media/p/1775.aspx

Binding a distributed application to a logical datacenter using the deployment designer

http://teamsystemrocks.com/media/p/1774.aspx

Using the Visual Studio 2005 Class Designer for Creating Documentation

http://teamsystemrocks.com/media/p/1761.aspx

Articles

TFS Event Handler #1 – Architecture

http://geekswithblogs.net/hinshelm/archive/2007/08/21/TFS-Event-Handler-in-NET-3-5-Part-1-The-Architecture.aspx

TFS Event Handler #2 – Handling TFS Events

http://geekswithblogs.net/hinshelm/archive/2007/09/07/TFS-Event-Handler-in-NET-3-5-Part-2-Handling-Team-Foundation-Server-Events.aspx

Ekobit recently released a new version of TeamCompanion. Now in version 2.2, this cool add-in allows you to integrate e-mail and Outlook with Team Foundation Server. This minor version release aims essentially for the improvement of usability and user experience. 

Here’s what you get with the 2.2 version:

• Better offline support and support for occasionally connected clients
• Improved Work item edit form
• Improved Work item preview (Support for history; preview is now fully customizable)
• Improved Work item from Mail action
• Improved Open related object action – for emails multiple related objects are offered; related work item for Outlook Appointments
• Improved Reports support (new conversion formats for Reports; support for Canceling )
• Improved Send Work Item as Mail action (‘with attachments’ option including attaching created mail back to the Work Item)
• Improved usability/ease of use
• TFS 2010 Beta support
• Windows 7 compatibile

Give it a try here (trial).

Ekobit’s TeamCompanion homepage.

I’ve been reading some info on the next release of Team Foundation Server, codename “Rosario” (if anyone knows the origin of this please let me know) and aside from technological advancements an improvements there are some budget and platform considerations to think about as well.

For starters, TFS “Rosario” was considered not to support Windows Server 2003. But Microsoft had little to gain from this, and customers had a lot to loose. So, next versions of TFS after Rsario will drop support for Windows Server 2003, and mantain full support for Windows Server 2008 and future releases.

TFS “Rosario” will be supporting full 64-bit on the server. Rosario will support both 32-bit and 64-bit server operating systems to ease the upgrade transition, however, post Rosario we will drop 32-bit server support.

The biggest change in the next release is indeed the abandon of SQL Server 2005. This is primarily due to the new features and improvements of SQL Server 2008 regarding text-search indexing, index compression, improved Reporting Services and easier setup and administration.

Microsoft-certified virtualization enviroments will also be tested/supported. In the Sharepoint area, Windows Sharepoint Services 2.0 will be discontinued, while WSS 3.0 (2007 release) takes it’s place. However, MOSS 2007 will have a better integration, providing a richer user interface experience.

 In the client area, all OS from windows XP forward will be supported, although it’s natural that older OS’s require some updates via service packs.

Project Server 2007 will also be supported, but not required, while Office 2007 get’s the job, with the TFS team firing Office 2003 version, which will be discontinued. This was necessary to implement Undo in MS Project and “formula persistence” in MS Excel.

So it all ends up well for technology evolution, but might be a pain for consumers and businesses who’ll loose support for their current platform setups. Future investments and requirement/cost ratio must be taken in to account.

The Team Foundation Server team released yesterday the new version of Power Tools, for the Visual Studio Team System 2008 Team Foundation Server.

The Visual Studio Team System 2008 Team Foundation Server Power Tools is a set of enhancements, tools and command line utilities that improve the Team Foundation Server user experience.

The following tools are installed with the tfpt.msi package:

• Command line tool (TFPT.EXE)
• Team Explorer IDE menu additions
• Build Notification tool
• TFS Best Practices Analyzer
• Process Template Editor
• Work Item Templates
• Custom check-in policies
• TFS Server Manager
• TFS Users tool
• Alert Editor

Also available is the WssExt64Bit installer which provides the ability to install the Team Foundation Server WSS extensions into a 64-bit WSS instance. The RTM version of the WssExt installer that ships with Team Foundation Server 2008 does not support 64-bit WSS sites.

You can download it here.

It seems that the Expression Team is currently working on a Team Foundation Server integration for Expression Blend and Expression Web.

In the current state of development we can see all the basic features TFS has to offer: add, checkin, checkout, remove. etc. It’s all there. It’s expected to have a complete integration, but we’ll have to wait for the next version of these two applications to confirm which, by the way, is currently unknown.