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Today Microsoft announced that they had acquired the Teamprise assets from SourceGear:
Microsoft Corp. today announced that it will purchase the Teamprise-related assets of SourceGear LLC, which enable developers using the Eclipse IDE or operating on multiple operating systems, including Unix, Linux and Mac OS X, to build applications with Microsoft Visual Studio Team Foundation Server. Development organizations will benefit from increased integration in heterogeneous environments, as well as reduced time and complexity associated with application development tasks. Functionality from the Teamprise Client Suite will be integrated into the Visual Studio product line beginning with Visual Studio 2010.
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The Teamprise technology will be available in the Visual Studio 2010 wave. Customers will be able to jointly purchase the Teamprise Client Suite technology, updated to work with Team Foundation Server 2010, and one Team Foundation Server client access license. Customers with Visual Studio 2010 Ultimate with MSDN also will receive the Teamprise Client Suite technology as part of their original subscription purchase. SourceGear will continue to provide support for Teamprise products and sell its latest release of the Teamprise Client Suite until the Microsoft solution becomes available.
Teamprise consists of the following:
Teamprise Plug-in for Eclipse. The Teamprise Plug-in for Eclipse allows developers to perform all their source control, bug tracking, build and reporting operations from within Eclipse and Eclipse-based integrated development environments (IDEs), such as Rational Application Developer, JBoss, BEA Workshop and Adobe Flex Builder.
Teamprise Explorer. Teamprise Explorer combines all the functionality available to Eclipse developers using the Teamprise Plug-in into a stand-alone, cross-platform graphical user interface (GUI) application that is perfect for team members working outside of an IDE, such as graphic designers, quality assurance testers and project managers.
Teamprise Command-Line Client. The Teamprise Command-Line Client provides a cross-platform, nongraphical interface to Team Foundation Server, making it perfect for scripting and build scenarios or for developers who prefer a command-line interface.
This seems like an novel play by Microsoft to extend the market for Visual Studio Team Foundation Server to non-Microsoft developers. On the face of it that seems unlikely until you consider developers in large shops with heterogeneous environments whose management might be receptive to a single uniform tool for all their development management needs. View this as a move on IBM’s Rational products that provide much the same functionality plus providing a Microsoft foot in the door the next time a large enterprise needs to make a development platform decision.
Microsoft’s Developer Division has a lot on its plate: Windows 7, Cloud Computing, SharePoint 2010, Office 2010, and the yearning to somehow get Visual Studio Team System to make inroads on IBM’s Rational application lifecycle management tools. Visual Studio 2010 and the accompanying .NET Framework (.NET FX 4) is Microsoft’s answer and this week they announced Beta 2 and a scheduled general availability of March 22, 2010.
You will note, of course, that VS2010 lags Windows 7 and that is a problem for developers who really want to be at the cutting edge., particularly with .NET. While you certainly can build applications with Windows 7 features with Visual Studio 2008 and the .NET 3.5 SP1 that comes with Windows 7, it is not the kind of experience Microsoft would prefer for developers. More to the point for development organizations: you won’t get fired for not exploiting the new Windows 7 features in your mission critical apps so inevitably such apps will be slow to arrive and even slower because of the schedule mismatch.
As for the rest of the agenda:
Beta 2 also includes integrated tooling for SharePoint, including project templates and debugging support, and runtime and tooling support for developing great Windows 7 applications.
Since Beta 1, new Windows Azure Tools templates make it easy to get started developing Windows Azure applications, and enhanced support for Silverlight 3 databindings let you focus on writing your code.
Team Foundation Server is now included in all versions of Visual Studio 2010 with MSDN. For small teams that need only core development features such as source control, bug tracking, and build automation, TFS Basic offers a simple, streamlined install and runs on server or client machines. Test Elements users will notice a more intuitive and responsive user interface.
In the latter regard, Microsoft has completely reorganized the packaging of Visual Studio and the Microsoft Developers Network to, among other things, merge Team System into the base packages.
Microsoft announced today that that they would be shutting down their Popfly simplified Silverlight programming tooling project:
We want to thank everyone who registered for and used Popfly. We’ve been fortunate enough to see all the innovative mashups, Web pages, and games you’ve created since we launched Popfly two years ago and it’s been a pleasure to watch the spirit of creativity flow through a growing Popfly community over the life of the product.
Unfortunately, on August 24, 2009 the Popfly service will be discontinued and all sites, references, and resources will be taken down. At that time, your access to your Popfly account, including any games and mashups that you have created, will be discontinued.
Popfly seems to have never found an audience presumably because there is a point beyond which you cannot simplify programming if you want to produce something useful.
Microsoft has released Silverlight 3, the latest version of their rich media application platform which rivals Adobe Flash. In addition, a release candidate of Expression Blend 3, the Silverlight development tooling, has also been released with a promise of the full Expression 3 family of Web development products shipping within 30 days.
You can hit the websites for Silverlight or the Expression family or the combination for much more detail, but Microsoft’s Scott Guthrie offers a succinct summary of what is new. My choices for the high points:
Silverlight 3 enables applications to run outside the browser and taken offline. Users can safely install web applications on their computers, and create persistent shortcuts to them on the desktop, start menu and taskbar (this is supported on both Windows and the Mac).
Silverlight 3 now supports hardware graphics acceleration and HD video. IIS Media Services is a free server product that complements Silverlight and provides the ability to efficiently stream media over HTTP. It enables both on-demand and live HD video to be delivered using “smooth streaming” - which is an adaptive streaming algorithm that can deliver video at bitrates optimized for a client’s network conditions and CPU capabilities.
Free download that enables Silverlight 3 development support for VS 2008 and the free Visual Web Developer 2008 Express.
The latter has the potential to really explode Silverlight adoption by placing the bar to entry very low. On the other hand, I found the IIS Media Services demo to be anything but smooth streaming.
Finally, per Scott Guthrie, "Expression Studio 3 will be included as part of the MSDN Premium and higher subscriptions (meaning MSDN Premium customers don’t have to pay anything extra to get all of the Expression Studio products). " This apparently ends the furor over whether developers with MSDN subscriptions should get access to "designer" tools as part of the subscription.
