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Microsoft announced that its long-awaited TFS (Team Foundation Server) enterprise development tool will be released to manufacture on March 17.
Rick LaPlante, General Manager of Visual Studio Team System, Microsoft, announced the news at the SDWest (Software Development West) 2006 show in Santa Clara, Calif., on March 16.
LaPlante said TFS bits are expected to be available to customers on the MSDN (Microsoft Developer Network) early next week.
TFS is a workflow collaboration engine and serves as a centralized data warehouse for development project information. Moreover, TFS supports the reporting and auditing features of the Software Engineering Institutes CMM (Capability Maturity Model).
With TFS, organizations can automatically collect the information necessary to generate customized reports that help address the increases in industry regulation.
Microsoft formally announced Visual Studio 2005 in November, but the TFS component of the Team System version of the product was not available and Microsoft said it would be ready during the first quarter of this year.
Meanwhile, Microsoft partners announced products and services to support TFS. Teamprise, a division of SourceGear LLC, announced that it will release Teamprise Client Suite 1.0, which will enable development teams in heterogeneous environments to use the source control and work item tracking features of TFS from within the Eclipse IDE (Integrated Development Environment), and from other operating systems, including Linux and Mac OS X.
Ravenflow, formerly N8 Systems, announced RAVEN Professional, a bundle of tools based on the companys RAVEN Scenario product, which automatically generates UML (Unified Modeling Language) diagrams from plain English text.
The professional edition is a bundle that supports various development platforms, one of which is Visual Studio 2005 Team System and TFS, the company said.
Also, Electronic Data Systems and Fujitsu Consulting said they will be using and extending Visual Studio Team System and TFS to develop solutions for their customers.
In addition, at SDWest VSTS won a Jolt Award for Product Excellence in the Development Environment category.