Brian Harry posted asking what should be in Team Foundation Server vNext.

I have several pet features that were cut at the SDRs I went to that I would like to drop back in the hat:

 Aggregation - At most large shops there will never be a single TFS Project.  Yet management needs a view into the projects across the entire corporation. Give me a way to get consolidated views of where all my projects are at, how much effort was expended in a release, i.e. what it is actually costing me to build my software and what is the big picture.

 Occasionally connected developer - give me a way to still do source control while I am disconnected from TFS.  Then when I get back into the office let me resync the source control systems.  This allows me to still checkpoint my work as I refactor while on the plane but still have visibility into the steps I went through when I get back into the office.

 Methodology Editors - Just about everyone would love to change the methodologies in some minor way but the bar to doing this is pretty high. We have great Windows Forms and ASP.NET designers, why am I hand editing XML files to change the layout of work items?  Reminds of editing dialog resources in the dark days of windows.

 Web UI / Customer Portal - Not all of the consumers of TFS data are users of the IDE.  The Sharepoint site was a great start in this direction but step it up. Add a way to enter work items directly in the sharepoint site.  Give me a way to create a customer facing portal that gives them some limited visibility into my methodology.  i.e. be able to enter/search work items, get builds and look at fixes in SCM.

 Better Integration Tools - MSBuild is cool.  But once again I am back in the dark ages editing XML by hand!  Make the Team Build wizard re-entrant so I can make changes.  Better yet use your wizzy new DSL toolkit to give me a DSL that sits on top of MSBuild and gives me a nice UI to create/edit/maintain my build scripts.  Extend the build system to do things like help me build my database from scratch out of artifacts checked into the SCM system.  Almost every team needs to do this yet the tools are lacking at best.

Those are a start!

Wednesday, March 01, 2006 3:02:09 PM (Pacific Standard Time, UTC-08:00)         Comments [3]