New docs available about buying or upgrading to Visual Studio 2005 Team System

Hey all, I found a couple of documents that were posted this past Monday March 21 that give more details about migrating to Visual Studio 2005 and specifically to the new VS 2005 Team System for enterprise-level development lifecycle management, project management, architecture and testing. You can go to this site to look at a set of pricing options the various versions of Visual Studio 2005 that will be available. You can also go to this site to look at various MSDN subscription options that will allow you to upgrade to VS 2005 Team System products.

You can also go here to see more details about the various components that will be a part of the VS 2005 Team System. I'm especially excited to see that we're creating tools targeted specifically towards testers in this version of VS. When I first switched from the Visual Studio setup team over to Windows Embedded, I got invited to participate in a usability study for some of the test tools. I guess they thought that I was less biased since I wasn't working on the Visual Studio team anymore, or something like that. At any rate, even back then when a lot of the features hadn't yet been implemented it was impressive to see the tight integration of the experiences of writing code and writing, scheduling and running unit tests for that code. I haven't had a chance to try out the features since that usability study, but with beta 2 getting pretty close to releasing I will definitely have to check it out again and see how far things have come since last year.

I encourage you all to give VS 2005 a try also by downloading one of the community technology previews. The most recent drop of the Team System is from December 2004, and the most recent drop is the Professional edition from February 2005.