I just saw on Rob Caron’s blog that a few Team System related chats are lined up for this week. I have gathered some great, up-to-the-minute information from past VSTS chats. These chats are a great opportunity to discuss problems/ideas/requests with the developers and feature owners.

Here’s what’s on tap for this week:

Using the Domain-Specific Languages Tools for Visual Studio 2005
Tuesday, May 24th, 9:00AM – 10:00AM PDT (GMT -8)

Advanced Development and Testing Tools in Visual Studio 2005 Team System (2 chats)
Thursday, May 26th, 5:00PM – 6:00PM PDT (GMT -8)
Friday, May 27th, 8:30AM – 9:30AM PDT (GMT -8)

You can join these chats by visiting http://msdn.microsoft.com/chats/chatroom.aspx during the scheduled times. If you’re not able to make the chats, you can always find what was discussed at the chat transcript archive.

See you in the chat room!

As with all good fortunes that come my way, my NAnt article that was supposed to be published in this month’s edition (May/June) of Code Magazine was somehow lost in the shuffle. Did you notice the snafu? The cover clearly lists the article but if you were to open up the magazine, it’s nowhere to be found. D’oh!

Don’t fret, the fine folk at Code Magazine promise me that it will be included in the next issue. In the meantime, you can find the article in it’s entirety here. They somehow forget to include my picture, which is probably for the best.

The VSTS folk were kind enough to gather for a chat on Team Foundation this morning. Here are some tidbits that I learned from the chat….

• The next CTP will be released “In summer”. Somewhat vague but another one is coming.
  
  
  
• Active Directory will not be required in Team Foundation! (woot!) Security will be maintained in Active Directory and a SQL data store and this awesome addition will be available in the next CTP.
  
  
  
• According to the man himself,a “throttled” version of Team Foundation WILL be available in each of the VSTS editions!!! As a matter of fact Rick has outlined the details and provided some more details on pricing in his latest post.
  
  
  
• Microsoft is not promising anything when it comes to being able tomergeyour Beta2 Team Foundation data over to the RTM data stores. The plan is to be able to migrate data from Beta3 onward and looking at the possibility of locking down the database at the Summer CTP.
  
  
  
• Microsoft is tossing around the posibility of creating an add-in for VS2003 to be able to integrate with the VSTS Source Control system. They feel it would require a few months development effort. Any takers???
  
  
  
• The Team Foundation setup process is improving and the team is working on automating as many features as possible. There are some items, such as IIS and SQL, that can’t be automated.