I simply couldn’t believe what I was reading earlier today. This is something very, very cool. Even before Visual Studio 2008 is officially released (we are still in beta 2 for Visual Studio 2008), you can already download and take a look at the next version of Visual Studio Team System, codenamed ‘Rosario’. I remember that I once wrote that products that are released are kind of boring, especially when you have been beta testing them for a long time. I am not sure any more if wrote this just after the release of Visual Studio 2005 or after the release of Windows Vista. My strong request at that time was to provide us with new bits, not those release bits that kind of looked boring after having worked with beta versions and release candidates for a long time. Well, right now the Visual Studio team is totally fulfilling my wishes. I think it is absolutely fantastic that they already provide an early preview of Visual Studio Rosario. Looking at the time between Visual Studio 2005 and Visual Studio 2008, you might assume that you will be looking at bits that will only be released in 2010 or 2011. In other words, this is a great opportunity to look into the future. I really like to thank the Visual Studio team to give us very early access to future releases.

Hopefully this is something that other teams are considering as well. As it is right now, I was sort of surprised with the latest version of Windows Embedded CE 6.0 R2. It would have been cool to have early access to that product as well. Also, I would love to take a look at the successor of Windows Vista (I don’t even know its code name, but I do have one suggestion for the release name; Why not call it Windows Panorama?). Hopefully all the development teams within Microsoft take the Visual Studio team as an example and give us early bits of new products. I for one person would love to have those. After all, testing new products on a larger scale with lots of people will definitely lead to a much higher quality of the end result. I am happy and ready to invest some time into this task!

I just downloaded the bits; they are for sure early bits. At the same time, they give us a great feeling of what is coming up in the next two to three years or so. Here is a list of additional functionality you will get with Visual Studio Rosario (don’t get confused by the fact that Visual Studio in this build is still called ‘Orcas’), which sort of proves that this release will contain a lot of functionality around developing software products with larger teams:

·         Joint prioritization and management of IT projects through integration with Microsoft Project Server

·         Project management across multiple projects for proactively load balancing resources according to business priorities

·         Full traceability (inc. hierarchical work items) to track project deliverables against business requirements and the ability to conduct rapid impact analysis of proposed changes

·         Comprehensive metrics and dashboards for shared visibility into project status and progress against deliverables

·         Powerful new features to enable developers and testers to quickly identify, communicate, prioritize, diagnose and resolve bugs

·         Integrated test case management to create, organize and manage test cases across both the development and test teams

·         Testing automation and guidance to help developers and testers focus on business-level testing rather than repetitive, manual tasks

·         Quality metrics for a ‘go/no-go’ release decision on whether an application is ready for production and has been fully tested against business requirements

·         Rapid integration of remote, distributed, disconnected and outsourced teams into the development process

·         Easy customization of process and guidance from Microsoft and partners to match the way your team works

·         Integrated support to build setup packages using Windows Installer XML technology

·         Improvements to multi-server administration, build and source control

If you want to take a look at these early bits, you can download them in a VPC image here. Just make sure that you have enough physical memory on your target machine to actually let Visual Studio Rosario run reasonably.

Maarten Struys