Visual Studio and TFS 2010 Pricing Announced

If you’ve been wondering exactly what the various new Visual Studio 2010 SKUs are going to cost, then wonder no more.  The retail pricing for Visual Studio 2010 and Team Foundation Server 2010 have been released:

Suggested Retail Pricing (USD) for Visual Studio 2010

			With 1-Year MSDN Subscription*
Product	Buy	Upgrade	Buy	Renew
Visual Studio 2010 Ultimate	-	-	$11,899	$3,799
Visual Studio 2010 Premium	-	-	$5,469	$2,299
Visual Studio 2010 Professional	$799	$549	$1,199	$799
Visual Studio Test Professional 2010	-	-	$2,169	$899
Visual Studio Team Foundation Server 2010	$499	$399	-	-
Visual Studio Team Foundation Server 2010 CAL	$499	-	-	-
Visual Studio Load Test Virtual User Pack 2010 (1000 Virtual Users)	$4,499	-	-	-

* Subscription contents vary by purchased product.

Note that these are retail prices.  If you typically buy volume licenses, then the prices will no doubt be less than those listed here.  Also, as always, the “Express” SKUs (not listed here) will be free.

Visual Studio 2010 TFS Upgrade Guide

Continuing along with my recent flurry of posts regarding various Visual Studio 2010 guidance being released by the Rangers, here’s one that has perfect timing for me personally – the Visual Studio 2010 Upgrade Guide.

If you are planning on upgrading from Team Foundation Server 2008 (or even TFS 2005) to TFS 2010, then this guide is a gold mine of information.  It covers in-place upgrades as well as migration upgrades and details the steps that must be completed for more than a dozen specific scenarios.  For example, enabling branch visualization in upgraded projects, splitting team projects into multiple collections, and much more.

Although this guide is currently listed as a “beta” release, it contains a lot of great information.  If you’re planning an upgrade to TFS 2010, I highly recommend you check this guide out.

Update: While you’re at it, it’s worth checking out this post on Rules to Better TFS 2010 Migration.

Omaha Team System User Group Meeting Next Week

Next week will be our first Team System User Group meeting of the year and will start the third year for the Omaha Team System User Group!  I am looking forward to yet another great year and with Visual Studio 2010 and Team Foundation Server 2010 just around the corner, there is going to be more new material than we could possibly cover!  So, if you have any specific topics that you would love to see covered in the user group, please let us know.  Also, if you have a topic that you would like to share with the group, we would love to have you.

Next week’s topic, Making Transparency Work—Reporting in Team Foundation Server 2010, will be presented by Michael Querimit (Quilogy) - As application development teams interact with Team Foundation Server 2010, a tremendous amount of information is instrumented and recorded. Explore how the new reporting features of TFS 2010 make transparency work by providing quantitative metrics in meaningful reports and dashboards to help you make better business decisions.

Visit the Omaha Team System User Group site for more information.

VS 2010 and TFS 2010 VM Factory Guidance

But wait, there’s more!…  Along with various other bits of guidance being published recently by the Rangers, there is also the Visual Studio 2010 and Team Foundation Server 2010 Virtualization Guidance.

“Visual Studio 2010 VM Factory is the reference implementation of a software solution that automates the creation of Visual Studio 2010 and Team Foundation Server 2010 virtualized environments. The purpose of this project is to build prescriptive guidance around virtualization of the Visual Studio 2010 and guidance for full automation of the creation of virtual machines using the VM Factory. The goal is to help users with the installation and configuration of virtualized environments with least effort and maximum automation.”

If you are planning on virtualizing any portion of your Visual Studio 2010 and/or Team Foundation Server 2010 installation, then this guidance can be invaluable.  Even if you’re just wandering whether or not you should virtualize, then you should read this guidance.

There are three downloads available on this site:

• Virtualization Guidance for Visual Studio 2010
• Virtualization Visual Studio ALM Rangers Base Image Guide
• Team Foundation Server Planning Guidance Poster - Capacity Planning

Visual Studio 2010 Quick Reference Guidance Released

If you’re looking for some quick information regarding the myriad features in Visual Studio 2010, then look no further than the recently published Visual Studio 2010 Quick Reference Guidance.  This is yet another example of a great guidance project released by the Rangers in the past few weeks.

“The Visual Studio 2010 Quick Reference Guidance consists of compact cheat sheets for Team Foundation Server (TFS) 2010 and Visual Studio (VS) 2010, addressing the core problem of teams in the field who are unaware of Visual Studio and Team Foundation Server capabilities or have little time to invest in detailed education.”

This guidance is provided as three separate downloads (a zipped file of XPS documents) containing the following features:

Overview (Default Download) – an overview of the guidance and focus areas, contained in one index table and overview quick reference poster.

Basic Guidance - a collection of basic guidance sheets, focusing on the “what” are the key features and “why” to consider them.

Supporting Guidance  - a set of documents and quick reference posters, supporting the basic guidance sheets.

This set of guidance contains some great looking reference posters and quick-reference sheets and is a great place to start when learning about the various features in Visual Studio 2010.

Visual Studio 2010 Launch Date Set (Again)

As pointed out last month, Microsoft pushed back the launch for Visual Studio 2010 (originally set for March 22nd, 2010).  At that time, they stated only that it would be pushed back a few weeks (citing performance reasons).

Now, several weeks later, they have reset the Visual Studio 2010 launch date for April 12th, 2010 as pointed out by Rob Caron in a “short but sweet blog post.

Although it’s only being pushed back three weeks, it does give us the benefit of getting another interim release (a release candidate to be available in February) prior to the RTM release.  If you weren’t quite ready to “go live” with Beta 2, maybe the RC will fit better within your timelines.

TFS 2010 Requirements Management Guidance Ships!

As we near RTM for Visual Studio 2010, we are going to start seeing more and more information being release providing guidance on the installation, configuration, and usage of Visual Studio 2010 and Team Foundation Server 2010.  One of the latest guidance project to be release by the Rangers is the Visual Studio 2010 Team Foundation Server Requirements Management Guidance.

“This Ranger solution addresses the People, Process, and Technology guidance for Requirements Engineering (RE) using Team Foundation Server. The goal of this guidance is to provide formalized Microsoft field experience in the form of recommended procedures and processes, Visual Studio Team System and Team Foundation Server configurations, and skill development references for the Requirements Engineering discipline of your application lifecycle.”

This release includes the following packages (which can be downloaded separately or together in a single package):

1. Introduction: RM Rangers Guide to the Complete Guide
2. Requirements Management Planning
3. Requirements Traceability
4. Analysis and Breakdown
5. Requirements Elicitation
6. Requirements Specification
7. Requirements Validation
8. Requirements Change Management and Approval
9. Requirements Management checklist sheet

Each of the above sections is packaged as a zipped Microsoft Word (.docx) document.  If you do not have Microsoft Word installed, you can download and install the free viewer from here.

Team Foundation Sidekicks for TFS 2010

Attrice has released version 3.0 of their (most useful) Team Foundation Server Sidekicks for Team Foundation Server 2010 Beta 2.  This set of utilities has been sorely missed since TFS 2010 was first made available for testing.  This release has pretty much the same functionality as version 2.4 (for TFS 2005/2008) with the following exceptions:

• Permissions Sidekick: this sidekick is not available in this release (to be added back in 2010 RTM timeframe)
• Build Type editing (VS integration only): this feature is not available in this release
• Dynamic History support (VS integration only): the History toolwindow is updated only when it is visible alongside with Source Control Explorer and single instance of the window exists (in 2010 History toolwindow may have multiple instances)

Read more about this release here – you can download version 3.0 directly from here.