Grant Holliday

Jeff Beehler has just announced:

… that the next Community Technology Preview of Rosario (officially known as Microsoft® Visual Studio® Team System code name “Rosario” April 2008 CTP) is now available.

It’s been 4-5 months since the last Rosario CTP was released, and now we’ve got a new pre-beta release to play with. Congrats to the VSTS team for getting another CTP out.

The single biggest feature in the November CTP was the “Planning a testing effort” and “Executing manual test cases” which I’ve blogged before. Then in the CTP before that we got to see Hierarchical work items in action. Rosario is certainly shaping up to be a pretty significant release – but don’t let that stop you upgrading to Team Foundation Server 2008 in the meantime

Here’s a list of scenarios & functionality that is included in this ~8GB VPC  – I encourage you to go through the mini-stories and provide any feedback to the team. This is the time to do it.

Architecture Edition

• Exploring the existing code structure
• Designing process flow as activities
• Designing user interactions with systems
• Designing system functionality as components
• Visualizing and designing types in systems
• Visualizing and designing interaction sequences in systems

Development Edition

• Simplify Code Analysis rule selection with rule sets
• Find and fix a bug using the historical debugger
• Identify the test impact of code changes
• Find a bug on a separate machine using the standalone debugger

Database Edition

• Building and using an off-line representation of your operational database as a “sandbox” development environment.
• Using Data Generation to custom-build data for testing your database application.
• Making and unit-testing schema and code changes in an off-line environment.
• Performing static code analysis of your programmability objects.

Test Edition

• Planning a testing effort
• Executing manual test cases
• Verify the fix
• Automate a manual test and add validation.

Team Foundation Server

• Managing an Agile schedule
• Easier reporting from Excel
• Managing features with the CMMI Process
• A new Add Files to Source Control wizard and support for drag and drop from Windows Explorer to Source Control Explorer
• An enhanced, non-modal conflict resolution experience, integrated into the pending changes tool window
• A new history view that shows labels applied to a file as well as how changes were merged across branches
• A new automated build system built on Windows Workflow Foundation, featuring dynamic build machine allocation from a machine pool and distributed build functionality
• Rollback for a check in (currently only available at the command line)
• Many Source Control Explorer usability enhancements

Feedback in the form of bugs and suggestions can be submitted via http://connect.microsoft.com/visualstudio. Make sure when you submit issues through Connect that you indicate the product version as being “Visual Studio Team System Code Name “Rosario” (April 2008 CTP)”.