Visit with the Team System 2010 Team in Raleigh, NC

Last week I had to opportunity to visit with the team working on Team System in Raleigh, NC. I contacted Jason Barile via Twitter a few weeks before and asked if I could stop by and he went all out to accommodate me and a few coworkers. I was pleasantly surprised when the meeting started and most of the Product Managers and Test Leads for the build, test, source control, and install/administration parts of Team Foundation Server were in attendance.

We talked about many aspects of VSTS 2010 during the meeting:

• How TFS Basic can be a "gateway drug" for those wanting to move from Visual SourceSafe but are not going to use all the features of the Team Foundation Server platform. The team talked about how easy it will be to upgrade from basic to the full version and that all your history will immediately be dumped into the warehouse as soon as you upgrade and your history will look as if the warehouse was installed from day one.
• There was plenty of discussion around implementing Agile practices with Team System and how much more tools will be available in 2010 to support those practices. There are plenty of new additions coming from Conchango to continue their support for Scrum in Team System.
• We spent some time talking about all the new offerings around testing that I was especially interested in since my company sold our QA product suite so there was a new gap in our offerings around automated feature testing that VSTS 2010 will fill in very nicely.
• My team was very excited that the upcoming VSTS 2010 Beta 2 release will include a go live license so some of our clients interested in early adoption can go ahead and implement this release with some support from Microsoft and a direct upgrade path to the final release.

After the meeting we went to lunch with Jason, Buck Hodges, and Adam Barr and continue our conversation. It was interesting during lunch when Jason brought up my views on exclusive check out I expressed in my interview with David Starr from the Elegant Code Cast. I explained that as a consultant I am dropped into teams of various make ups and not all of them have good practices around source control implemented even when they are using TFS. I have frequently had issues with developers making changes to solution and project files with shared check out and not being diligent when merging changes into source control. This has resulted in broken builds, missing files, etc. and me pulling my hair out. It has also been an issue with projects that have not implement good development practices like the SOLID principles and I have had entire data access layers in one class and people constantly stepping on each other's toes. I've had to adapt my source control practices to work around some situations like these that as a contractor I had little control over and no ability to change.

Below is a short (and poorly shot) video of the Microsoft team in Raleigh and a quick, walking interview with Buck, Adam, and Jason on their favorite features in VSTS 2010.