Rob Garrett - Blogs

VSTS is nice, but it isn't the holy grail. Quite frankly, much of this functionality already exists for free in the .NET world. NUnit, NAnt, and NDoc even do some things better than VSTS. Play around with it.

Sure, I see your point, but one of the things I like about VSTS is the collaborative environment it offers. For example, the IT dept can provide an infrastructure document and VSTS allows architects to map applications on the system architecture diagram to the infrastructure.

Seems dumb? Not really, on my current project the IT group and development group did not communicate well about what software applications would run on what servers.

VSTS also keeps tabs on work items. I want to see if it does a better job than MS Project, which seems to rely on the PM doing a good job at keeping it up to date.

Hey Rob,

Just wanted to offer a slight correction. The Visual Studio Team System editions (Team Edition for Software Developers, Team Edition for Software Architects, and Team Edition for Software Testers) don't install side-by-side with Visual Studio 2005 Professional...rather, they layer on additional features within the same IDE. It's all Visual Studio, but what features are available depends on which edition you install.

So if you have Visual Studio 2005 Professional installed, and then you install Visual Studio 2005 Team Edition for Software Developers, you will have all of the functionality of both when you open up the Visual Studio 2005 IDE.

If you want the full kit, you should consider the Team Suite, which includes all of the Team System editions in one package.

And, of course, for the work item tracking, reporting, build server, source control, etc., you will need to install the Team Foundation Server, which is a separate product.

Hope that clarifies things somewhat. Feel free to drop me a line via my blog contact page if you have any other questions about how all the pieces fit together.

Great, thanks Andrew, this makes everything clear. I had suspicions that installing the TS version would only install the missing components, but I wasn't sure.

I am in the process of setting up VSTS on a separate machine, after this is complete I'll install the TS version on my workstation.

I'll drop you a line if I run into problems.

Thanks.