I recently received an inquiry with a lot of good questions about Visual Studio Team Systems, and I thought I might try to do justice and answer them here in this space:
Q-During the presentation you mentioned the supportfor Microsoft products. Is there any support for nonMicrosoft products (databases, servers, etc.)? Will there be any way to include legacy systems, different Operating Systems and diverse protocols during the systems desing mode?
A. The system designers we used for designing the logical data center and the application environment allows us to pull in existing databases by using any of the standard providers. These include OLE DB, Oracle, SQL Server and ODBC. External web services can also be added to the solution.
Q-In the VS 2005 Team product is the design order
important? You demonstrated designing the system,
coding design/generation and then testing. Can the
order be code design/generation, system design and
testing? Or can the order be code design/generation,
testing and system design at the end? Will the product
be flexible enough so the coding, testing, and systems
design are independent and can be done in any order?
A. In the first demonstration we started out by defining our data center, something that would probably be taken care of by infrastructure architects. In the application connection designer, we defined a trial deployment in which we were able to associate the application components with the data center components. If we wanted to deploy to a different data center someone else designed we could always go back and perform that. At the point we implemented the solution, it stubbed out the code for our application and we were able to use the class designer to start modifying the code.
Q-During the presentation you demonstrated reverse
engineering. Is there round trip support (code - UML
diagrams and UML diagram to code)?
A. The class designer is a live view of the actual code. Changes made in the code are reflected in the class designer, and vice versa.
Q-What format are the Unit tests in (e.g. NUnit)? Will
there be any support for open source tools like NUnit?
A. The unit test cases are generated in the language you specify (either VB or C#, etc). These are added to a project and are compiled like any other code. The attributes of the methods & properties are used by the Test Explorer to manage the execution & validation of the test cases.
Q-Will the builds allow open source tools and third
party products to generate documentation (NDoc),
provide code verification (FxCop), and code coverage
(Clover.NET)?
A. VSTS is an extensible platform that is open to 3rd party products integrating with it. Code coverage & static analysis tools (FXCop & PREfast) are part of the product.
I hope these answer your questions, or at least give some direction. A lot of this information is available online on MSDN's web site (http://lab.msdn.microsoft.com/vs2005/teamsystem/developer/default.aspx)