Teamprise acquisition gives Visual Studio 2010 a stand in the Java world

While Visual Studio has traditionally been viewed as an IDE for .NET coding, the Team System label has indicated an expansion into the application lifecycle management (ALM) space since the Visual Studio 2005 release. Now Microsoft wants Visual Studio to fit the whole enterprise, with developers on all platforms.

Team Foundation Server and the Visual Studio Team Editions have certainly provided quite decent support for ALM in the .NET ecosystem, but they have never been viewed as a toolset for non-Microsoft developers. If you look at things from Microsoft’s development perspective, that is.

Meanwhile, a company called SourceGear has been developing its Teamprise line of products, whose spearhead has been the Team Foundation Server plugin for Eclipse, the well-known development environment in the Java world. Also, since the plug-in interface of Eclipse is sort of a de facto standard, the plugin has also been useful in several other environments such as Adobe Flex Builder.

Today, Microsoft announced that it has acquired the Teamprise line of products, and will integrate them into Visual Studio 2010. This means that the next release of Visual Studio will support TFS operations on Eclipse IDEs, but also feature a new command-line client and a stand-alone version of Team Explorer –like functionality. Importantly, these tools are also available on non-Windows platforms.

More content for the Ultimate edition

Of course, there’s a gotcha. To get the Teamprise bits, you would seem to need the Ultimate edition of Visual Studio 2010 (equivalent to the current Team Suite; see my colleague’s overview of the editions). Alternatively, you can license just the Teamprise bits and a TFS CAL for non-Visual Studio developers.

This isn’t really surprising: the reorganization of Visual Studio editions in 2010 pushed the Ultimate beyond most people’s needs: Visual Studio 2010 Premium is quite excellent for all but the most sophisticated, tool-driven development teams. On the other hand, Microsoft still wants to sell it, and adding more stuff under the Ultimate label is thus natural. Also, the pricing for the “Teamprise only” package hasn’t been announced; it is likely that for multi-platform developers, Visual Studio 2010 Premium + Teamprise Client Suite tools will still be cheaper than Ultimate.

It’s also interesting to note that the TFS 2008 release incorporated the TeamPlain web access portal acquired from DevBiz, and now the 2010 edition is boosted by the TeamPrise tools. What’s up for the next version?

November 9, 2009 · Jouni Heikniemi · 3 Comments
Tags: , ,  Â· Posted in: .NET

3 Responses

  1. Jouni Heikniemi - November 10, 2009

    Brian Harry also blogged on this with a few more details: http://blogs.msdn.com/bharry/archive/2009/11/09/microsoft-has-acquired-the-teamprise-client-suite.aspx

    It seems they also hired the team, which is no big surprise.

  2. bungle - November 11, 2009

    "the next release of Visual Studio will support TFS operations on Eclipse IDEs"

    What does this mean? What Visual Studio has to do with Eclipse? Isn't this just that MS bought Teamprise and now we have kind official client for TFS for Eclipse that is bundled with Ultimate Edition? Nothing really changed in Visual Studio or TFS?

  3. Jouni Heikniemi - November 11, 2009

    Yes, you're exactly right. This is about Visual Studio the product, not about the application (devenv.exe and its companions).

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