Microsoft told ComputerWire that pricing for the planned Visual Studio 2005 Team System (VSTS) would approximate the price of today’s Microsoft Developer Network (MSDN) Universal Subscription pricing of $2,799.
Prashant Sridharan, senior product manager for the .NET developer product management group, said: You can expect our price to be in-line, around or near our price currently. We are not going to be astronomically expensive compared to ALM tools today.
Sridharan was unwilling to provide further information, noting Microsoft was not quite ready to talk about pricing.
VSTS, due next summer, is Microsoft’s first solid entry into ALM, having left the market to more specialized ISV partners like Borland Software, IBM Rational and Mercury Interactive. For years, Microsoft’s only ALM presence came through development tools, with the Visual Studio Integrated Development Environment (IDE).
Microsoft, though, believes ALM today is prohibitively expensive and difficult to use. Microsoft’s self-proclaimed goal is to create a mass market for ALM by delivering tools that are both affordable and easier to use.
There’s a pretty large barrier for entry today, Sridharan said.
VSTS will serve as a platform enabling partners’ development, performance, bug tracking and testing tools to integrate and communicate with each other more easily. Integration will also, according to Microsoft, make ALM tools and practices more widely accessible, further driving the notion of an ALM mass market.
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We wanted to deliver an integrated set of tools and an integrate platform developers can build on top of, Sridharan said. We are going to succeed with Team Studio… the biggest value Microsoft can add to the industry is driving integration between tools and vendors.
By improving functionality and challenging ISVs on price, Microsoft hopes to improve the experience of developers targeting .NET and Windows, ensuring more ISVs and corporate developers gravitate towards these platforms instead of Java.
Ahead of what promises to be a big year for Microsoft and the ALM community as a whole, Microsoft will soon squeeze-out a second, pre-release technology preview that promises improvements in functionality and the interface.
The second Community Technology Preview (CTP) will feature improvements in item tracking and integration with the Team Foundation component of VSTS, which provides source code controls and team management tools. Sridharan said the CTP would provide ALM team members with a better idea of what they can eventually expect from the User Interface (UI).
While it is unclear when exactly Microsoft will launch VSTS, beyond saying simply summer 2005, Sridharan is already envisioning potential features for a second version.
Sridharan would like to see integration between code analysis and development, so an error can be highlighted as a security problem, for example, at the time it is made during the development phase. Currently, analysis is undertaken during the testing phase of the application’s lifecycle, after development, a fact that helps build delay and cost into the process of delivering an application.
Integration between VSTS and the planned Indigo web services communications platform, once expected with the delayed Longhorn operating system and now scheduled for updated versions of Windows Server 2003 and Windows XP, is also expected.
