Unveiled at Microsoft’s TechEd 2004 conference yesterday, Team System provides integrated design, development and testing tools unifying work of architects, developers and business managers.
Opening TechEd, Microsoft chief executive Steve Ballmer said Team System was part of Microsoft’s Dynamic Systems Initiative (DSI), because it helps unify design and deployment, and eliminate costly bugs and overruns associated with poorly run projects. DSI is Microsoft’s take on autonomic computing, with self-healing systems and software infrastructure that responds to business needs.
Ballmer told TechEd delegates in San Diego, California: I think for those of you who are in the IT side of the house, this is where we really come to the forefront with Dynamic Systems Initiative and make sure that the application development process and the management and operations process get integrated, so there’s far fewer disconnects and problems on applications that either you’re building or others are building for you.
DSI potentially pits Microsoft against rivals like IBM Corp, who is using its own application lifecycle tools acquired with Rational Software for design, modeling and management of software with the WebSphere Studio Java development suite.
Microsoft, while providing a well-respected tools suite in Visual Studio.NET, the company has largely been lacking in application lifecycle management (ALM). It has relied on partners, like Borland Software Corp and Rational – until IBM’s purchase – to provide ALM tooling. Borland is among those supporting Team System, also backed by Compuware, EDS, Telelogic, and Unisys.
Team System is the latest step in Microsoft’s race to become more self-sufficient, though. Planned for Visual Studio is software modeling framework and engine codenamed Whitehorse, capable of using Unified Modeling Language (UML), a de-facto industry language commonly used in an application’s architecture phase.
Team System provides tools to manage collaborative development processes between architects, designers, programmers and business managers, for change management, source control and enforcement to monitor projects, control bugs and ensure sign-off. Color-coded tools help project participants see which application code has been tested.
Also launched at TechEd, were Information Bridge Framework and Web Services Enhancements (WSE) 2.0 for Microsoft .NET. Information Bridge Framework is a set of components, tools and blueprints using XML helping developers quickly create and deploy Office System business applications using Work, Excel and Outlook.
WSE 2.0 is an add-in to Visual Studio.NET 2003 updating Microsoft’s web services security support. WSE 2.0 introduces improved support for WS-Security, WS-Policy and WS-SecurityPolicy, WS-Trust, WS-SecureConversation and WS-Addressing, support for Kerberos and custom XML tokens, and message-oriented SOAP programming to Visual Studio’s configuration editor, policy wizard and X.509 certification tool.
