One of the great stuff that Microsoft announced during the TechEd 2009 conference at Berlin was the acquisition of the Teamprise Client Suite from Teamprise. With this step heterogeneous development on the Team Foundation platform became once again easier. Free upgrades will be provided for all customers who are using Teamprise today.
Teamprise Client Suite consists of 3 components:
- Eclipse plugin - Allows developers to perform all of their source control, bug tracking, build, and reporting operations from within Eclipse and Eclipse-based IDEs, such as Rational Application Developer, JBoss, BEA Workshop, and Adobe Flex Builder. It integrates into the menu system of Eclipse as a standard Team Provider plug-in, but also provides developers with specific views and forms for interacting with the Team Foundation Server. Developers using the Teamprise Plug-in for Eclipse have the ability to take part in the entire software development process in use by their organization without leaving the comforts of their development environment.
- Stand-alone Explorer - Combines all of the functionality available to Eclipse developers using the Teamprise Plug-in into a stand-alone, cross-platform GUI application for team members working outside of a development IDE. Perform source control operations, browse the Team Foundation Server repository, edit bug reports, run work item queries, monitor builds, and view project reports all from within an application that has a native look and feel on the operating system you are using.
- Command line client - Provides a cross-platform, non-graphical interface to Microsoft's Team Foundation Server, for scripting and build scenarios or for developers who prefer a command-line interface. The command line interface is compatible with the current Microsoft supplied command line interface so scripts are interchangeable.
All of these components work on Windows, Mac, Linux and several flavors of Unix. In addition work is being done to explore providing these capabilities in mainframe environments to enable access to the Visual Studio ALM platform from there as well.