Impressed By the Visual Studio 2005 Team System

I’ve finally installed beta 2 of the Visual Studio 2005 Team System (VSTS) on a Virtual PC image. VSTS blew me away! Of the exciting things about it is how unit testing tools are gathered under one roof. Currently, you have to run around the internet downloading NUnit, NUnitAsp, a mock object library of your choice, something for code coverage, a Visual Studio.NET add-on that does it all for you in the IDE and doesn’t actually crash, etc.

In VSTS it’s all a part of one family, except that there’s no analogue of NUnitAsp. I don’t want to rehash it here since there’s a good article at MSDN: A Unit Testing Walkthrough with Visual Studio Team Test.

Next thing on my list is to sling a Windows Server 2003 and install Visual Studio Team Foundation server. You don’t have to run it, but it gives you additional tools for project management, source control and such.

One more thing that wows me about VSTS is the price tag. For the Developer, Tester and Architect editions it is close to 5 kilo dollars per license per year. That’s a little extreme, I think.