Well, its Friday morning and I am sitting here in the speakers lounge preparing for my session later on this afternoon. Yesterday was good fun. I didn’t have any sessions to present so I spent some time in the exhibition hall catching up with people and occasionally answering some peoples questions.

I also spent some time with a chap who was asking about Visual SourceSafe 2005 and it dawned on me that there are a lot of people out there think that Visual Studio Team System uses SourceSafe as the source code repository behind the scenes. I’ll re-iterate right here and now that this isn’t the case – VSTS has a brand new source code control system which is integrated with the Team Foundation Server.

Also on the subject of VSTS is the licensing costs. After talking with some of the chaps from Microsoft it appears that the cheapest (by far) way to buy Visual Studio Team Suite is by buying MSDN Universal edition now before the 31st of October.

This will set you back $3,894.00 but thats a lot better than $4,867.00 pricing tha kicks in after the October date.

If you have a license for MSDN Universal then come 7th of November you will be eligible to upgrade from Universal to Premium for $1,739.00 which will get you your copy of Team Suite which as you should all know by now gives you all the Architect, Developer and Testing orientated tools for VSTS.

If you don’t upgrade from Universal to Premium you need to chose one of the cut down team editions which just includes one of the tool categories. I think which option you go for will depend on how you structure your team. If you have people which are obvious testers/developers/architects then you can fairly safely go for one of the cut down versions - but if your people are cross skilled then you’ll need Team Suite.

I pretty regularly tell clients that they should be on MSDN Universal and this is a good example why. Being able to build stuff in your development environment without having to wait for your internal procurement department to get a copy of the software is a huge timesaver!

Anyway – here is a link to some more information that I found.