We’re confident that we will hit the release date of November 7, said Prashant Sridharan, group product manager for Microsoft’s developer division, referring to the client version of the product.
The release candidate (RC) contains the features that were in last spring’s beta version 2, the point at which Microsoft froze development, although minor aspects, such as the exact navigation of menus and dialog boxes, may change.
The release candidate is a build that may or may not be the actual iteration that enters general release. That depends on the number and severity of bugs that are uncovered by the developer community between now and the point that a gold CDROM is actually released to manufacturing.
At that point, Microsoft will ship three editions of Visual Studio, including the Express entry-level edition for developers of small, standalone applications; Standard, intended for client/server development; and Professional, for higher-end client/server and web applications with support for SQL Server 2005.
As for the server edition, which will include the long-awaited Team System, beta 3 is scheduled to ship around the same November timeframe. With role-based editions to include life cycle tools for architects, developers, testers, and project managers, it will include the Team System source code control engine, which Microsoft is leery about calling a repository.
It’s a collaboration server for storing artifacts of course code, said Sridharan, noting that it is intended for source code control, rather than the storage and retrieval of binary code. Not mentioned, of course, was Microsoft’s previous collaboration with the former Texas Instruments Software unit to build such a repository a decade ago.
However, he noted that Team System was designed so that it could be extended to contain binaries, noting that Logic Library is one of the partners that are likely to add the requisite functionality that might transform Team System into the R-word.
According to Sridharan, the Visual Studio team was careful to contain the scope of the project so they could get the product out the door. The reason we’ll probably ship on time is because of that tightness, he said.
