Planet SCM

No, that's not the name of a new feature coming in Visual Studio code name "Orcas" or Visual Studio Team System code name "Rosario". March 2007 (March 19th to be exact) is the Visual Studio Decennial since it marks the 10th anniversary of the release of Visual Studio 97, the first release of Visual Studio. Microsoft PressPass has a page o'quotes from numerous Microsoft customers and partners (Comments on the 10-year Anniversary of Microsoft Visual Studio, March 2007), and Prashant Sridharan is celebrating the anniversary in his keynote this morning at VSLive! in San Francisco, where Sam Gazitt is making his on-stage debut.

Ten years ago this month, the Internet start-up company I was at (IFusion) went belly-up. From there, I landed in my first role as a professional Visual Basic developer. Meanwhile, Microsoft released the first version of Visual Studio, Visual Studio 97. I was largely unaware of it at the time as the Visual Basic project I joined was written in Visual Basic 3. My job was to move it to Visual Basic 4. My next set of projects were all in ASP, Visual Basic 5, or Visual Basic 6, which wasn't really incorporated into Visual Studio yet. In fact, I never actually used Visual Studio as a product per se prior to arriving at Microsoft.

Visual Studio has come a long way in that 10-year period. To see where it's going, at least for Team System, go see the newly published Team System Future Releases Roadmap.

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As reported on Cameron Skinner's blog, Visual Studio 2005 Team Edition for Database Professionals won the Jolt Award for the Database Engines and Data Tools category at the 17th Annual Jolt Product Excellence Awards. Unfortunately, I didn't attend this year like I did last year when Team System won (Team System Wins Jolt Award), so I don't know yet how we did in the other categories (17th Annual Jolt Product Excellence Awards Finalists).

Matt Nunn Accepting Award (Photo: John Lam)

Source: The What, The Why, The How : DBPro wins Jolt Award!

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Adam Gallant from Microsoft Canada is hosting a series of Team System Webcasts that will run between now and June with multiple repeats available for each Webcast. See Adam's blog post on the topic (New VSTS WebCasts) for links to particular sessions.

• Visual Studio Team System and MSDN Licensing Demystified
• Integrated Team Development with Visual Studio Team System
• Visual Studio Team Foundation Server
• Visual Studio Team Edition for Database Professionals
• Visual Studio Team Edition for Software Testers

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Richard Waymire, Program Manager Architect for the Visual Studio Team Edition for Database Professionals group, wrote an article late last year for MSDN (A Security Overview of Microsoft Visual Studio 2005 Team Edition for Database Professionals) that provides an overview of the security aspects of the product.

To integrate database development into the overall life cycle most effectively, you must understand the variety of security implications in Team Edition for Database Professionals. These implications include how to set up and configure the product more securely, how to use the security-related features of the product, and best practices for a more secure implementation of your database projects. (11 printed pages)

Source: A Security Overview of Microsoft Visual Studio 2005 Team Edition for Database Professionals

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In this case study (Microsoft Case Studies: Gulf Coast Seal), the first for Team Edition for Database Professionals, Gulf Coast Seal found great success in using the product to upgrade a mission-critical data warehouse with minimal impact on operations. At the same time, they obtained better control of their database development life cycle.

Gulf Coast Seal manufactures and globally distributes high-performance industrial sealing products. An upgrade of the company’s enterprise resource planning (ERP) software required significant changes to the data warehouse used to access ERP data. To reduce impact to the business, the changes had to be performed and deployed with minimal downtime. Two programmers upgraded the data warehouse in only eight weeks by relying on Microsoft® Visual Studio® 2005 Team Edition for Database Professionals. Because deployment required merely eight hours, the impact on operations was minimal. Now, database developers are even more productive, collaborative, and firmly in control of database change. With better control of the database development life cycle and source control, Gulf Coast Seal continues to reduce risk and cost.

Source: Microsoft Case Studies: Gulf Coast Seal

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