I’m taking a VSTS class this week at Microsoft in Columbus, Ohio. The course is being taught by Chris Menegay, a Microsoft Regional Director and principal consultant with Notion Solutions, Inc. Chris developed the course material and works closely with the VSTS team, and seems to really know VSTS. I took some notes today but I figured they’d be more useful in electronic format, and I figured while I was doing that I may as well just blog it. Note that this is not at all indicative of what Chris focused on or taught today, but is instead just some things I found interesting and worth noting.

VSTS– A software life cycle tool (not a coding tool) – One of main goals is to increase visibility and transparency of software development

– Visual Studio Professional will inherit many of the features today held by VS Enterprise Architect, since there will be no enterprise architect sku in the 2005 VS release.

Team Foundation Server – Designed to have only one per network (not clusterable) – Should scale to about 500 users – Underlying architecture is ASP.NET, Web Services, and SQL Server

Process Templates– Define a lot of the behavior/rules of VSTS – XML format – Extensible – VSTS ships with two out of the box

• MSF Agile — “evolve and adapt” — lightweight
• MSF CMMI — “plan and optimize” — formal and measurable (CMMI = Capability Maturity Model Integration, whatever that means)

Class Diagram Features (not really VSTS, but cool) – No synchronization between model and code required; no metadata stored. The data representation is code. – Think of the class diagram as a rendering engine for your code. – Limitations — you can only edit class files in your project, and features like ‘Show Derived Classes’ will only show classes in your project (this is a good thing – consider if you used this feature on a framework base class like, System.Object, if its scoped wasn’t so limited)

We did some labs with whitehorse diagrams and such but that doesn’t really excite me very much. Tomorrow I think we’ll get into the testing and stress testing features, and later the build management features, which are what I’m particularly interested in at the moment. If I have time I’ll blog about those as well.

Oh, and read Rob Caron’s blog if you want more info on VSTS.