What's coming in the July CTP
The July CTP is coming out soon and I got news of some of what will be included, as well as things that might be included. There are a few things that I’m looking forward to.
- The command-line tool for running builds. – Some people have already written their own, it will be nice to have the official one.
- New reporting structure – they have supposedly cleaned up the codenames from the operational datastore, and changed the OLAP structure for reporting. I’ve been ignoring reports until they’ve finished this (why learn stuff that’s going to be removed). So now I’ll finally be able to spend some time learning how write some reports. First up – bugs created by developer ;-)
- Updated VSS migration tool – supposedly the new tool is going to have better visibility into what happens.
- Admin tools – supposedly for some sort of backup and restore.
- Source Control Proxy – unfortunately, I have a client that could probably use this, but I’m suggesting they stick with Beta 2 until either another beta comes out, or RTM. There are supposedly some pretty good gains in overall performance.
- Stability & Performance – this build is going to be used for Microsoft’s “dogfood” server. That gives me some confidence that at least the product group thinks it’s a pretty stable build.
- Performance boosts for the Office integration pieces – Excel and Project can be awful sluggish at times sync’ing work items. This is supposed to be better in the July CTP.
Things I’m hopeful will be in the July CTP, but not sure… I will have to check once I get it:
- HTTP support for Team Foundation Server – while it boggles my mind that this wasn’t there from Day 1 (it’s an architecture change IMO), this is supposed to be support by RTM, and _may_ be in the July CTP. It will be nice not to have to VPN.
- Support of ASP.NET unit tests _may_ be working in the July CTP – I haven’t tried this in Beta 2, but supposedly it’s problematic.
- Revised Static Analysis checkin policy (aka STAN). We’ve been working on some extensibility stuff and some of the checkin policy things seemed like a hack, I’ve been told that this policy was getting reworked, and hopefully that will help us out.
Overall, there’s some pretty good stuff, and it sounds like quite a few bugs are fixed. I have a feeling this is just going to get me anxious for the next beta. The only downer is that it doesn’t support a single server install L.