With today being the first day of Microsoft’s TechEd 2004 conference, there have been quite a few announcements. To me, the biggest announcement was Visual Studio 2005 Team System.

This appears to be Microsoft’s answer to those customers who want to be able to manage more of their development process using Visual Studio, or other Microsoft apps at least. I haven’t read up on it yet in detail, but it sounds ilke it offers quite a few features. To me, though, the biggest feature must be that this includes a source control app - one that isn’t Visual SourceSafe.

Don’t get me wrong, Visual SourceSafe is a great little tool. I used it at home for personal projects for quite some time before switching over to Subversion. I still use it at work, and with my team of 20 or so developers, it just doesn’t cut it. This new source control app looks to fix all of SourceSafe’s faults, namely using the file system for storeage (the new app uses SQL Server), and there will actually be a server component (imagine that).

For more information on Visual Studio 2005 Team System, see these posts by Kirby Parnell and Chris Sells.