Developer Collaboration Features

Question

New to development but I do own Visual Studio 2008 Team Suite and Visual Studio Professional 2005 

    I did have a few questions about Visual Studio that I could not answer from other sources.  The term 'Team System' suggests collaboration between developers with this package.  I have not found these features in Visual Studio nor can I find any I find any documentation on same.

 

·        Can a developer using Team System 2008 collaborate with another VSTS developer(s) in real time [or otherwise] so that they can see each other’s project, coding, etc.?  I have the following comment in another forum that suggests such tools exist…

 

            ·        Is there some feature within VSTS that allows participating developers to mutally view [like SharePoint, similar web service, etc.] the status of projects and contributors?

·        I also own Visual Studio 2005 Professional.  If there is a collaborative feature in the 2008 version could it be made to share development tasks with Visual Studio Professional 2005 and Team Suite 2008?

 

·        Is there an administrative feature that would allow someone, not necessarily a developer, to assign and monitor contributions by developers on projects?

·        If any of the above exists specific toolbar commands would be extremely useful.

 

 

            

 

Answer 1

Hi MNewsome,

VSTS is the client of Team Foundation Server. After you install TFS on a server machine, and Team Explorer on client(which is included in VSTS, but you need to install it manually), users can use Team Explorer to connect to TFS.

1) With version control of TFS, user can see other users' code
2) TFS also includes Windows Sharepoint Service. Each Team Project has a portal on WSS.
3) VS 2005 Professional 2005  without Team Explorer can not connect to TFS. But you can install Team Explorer 2005, though some new feature in 2008 are diabled.
    You can also install Team Explorer 2008 on the client installed VS2005.
4) Yes, you can use Work Item Tracking to monitor developers' work. Also there are many reports about their work.
5) Tfs Power Tools can help TFS work better.

Please view the artickes on MSDN Library for detail http://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/library/ms181232.aspx.

If there is anything unclear, please feel free to tell me.

Best Regards,
Ruiz

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