Let’s settle this up front. Microsoft has let its developers down. During the past few years, the company has left a trail of broken promises: a .Net-centered operating system; a broad stack of managed, .Net-based server applications; effortless targeting of everything from servers to cell phones; an egalitarian approach to programming languages; and a new, revolutionarily productive, framework-aware IDE.
All of its pomp and preening attracted a crowd, but Microsoft’s grand, united procession split into smaller, scattered parades. Instead of pulling the Microsoft development community together, the .Net initiative and Visual Studio .Net have in some ways increased fragmentation and distressed developers with major changes that seemed arbitrary. Meanwhile, the Java and open source communities have worked hard to increase the attractiveness of their environments to the degree that some traditionally loyal Microsoft developers have acquired a chronic case of wandering eye.
Microsoft is betting that Visual Studio 2005 (code-named “Whidbey”) in conjunction with the new Visual Studio Team life-cycle management system announced last week will revive developer enthusiasm — and rebuild the company’s credibility for expensive future ventures such as the Longhorn operating systems and the Yukon edition of SQL Server. Although neither VS 2005 nor VS Team ships until next year, a deep dive into betas and intense discussions with Microsoft have convinced us that Redmond has been listening hard to both enterprise developers and their managers.
Turning back and forging ahead
Microsoft is mounting a two-pronged offensive to win back its enterprise development credentials. First, with VS 2005, it’s trying to retain individual developers on the verge of straying elsewhere. VS 2005 restores most of the exquisitely balanced feel of VS 6: relaxed yet productive, knowing yet submissive, the unobtrusive workmate who pulls you out of a fire the instant you call for help. Remember Visual Basic? Visual C++? Visual InterDev? They’ve grown up a bit since developers last saw them, but they’re coming home in VS 2005.
The second line of attack goes beyond the developer’s desktop to encompass life-cycle and project management. Visual Studio Team Foundation is the server-based integration and services platform, and Visual Studio Team System is a suite of client components that participants will use to plug into the team environment. (For brevity, the combined solution is referred to here as VS Team.)
VS Team is Microsoft’s first attempt to get directly involved in most stages of the enterprise software development life cycle. And its reach is broad. Microsoft plans to incorporate design, planning, project management, enterprise-grade source-code control, coding, static analysis, profiling, functional and load testing, infrastructure design and validation, deployment, and work-item tracking into VS Team’s fully loaded configuration.
The way we were
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