Microsoft Maps Plans for ‘Rosario’ App-Dev Future

Microsoft is charting its future product course beyond “Orcas” in 2007.

The next major release of the company’s Visual Studio application development tool set is known by the code name Orcas, but Microsoft also is hard at work on a version of the tool set that will revise Visual Studio Team System, or VSTS, the company’s team development system.

Sam Guckenheimer, group product planner for VSTS, said the follow-on release to Orcas is code-named Rosario, the name of a resort on Orcas Island, one of the San Juan Islands in Washington.

Meanwhile, Microsoft has a vision of an even-more-distant island for follow-on tooling to Orcas in a set of technologies code-named Hawaii—a name that’s not yet attached to a release, Guckenheimer said.

The goal of Microsoft’s successive versions of its tools, including those that are team-oriented, is to better enable teams, at first, and then entire organizations to become more productive with the applications they build.

Orcas, due in 2007, is a release of the whole Visual Studio stack, including VSTS, that is tied to the Office System 2007 and Vista product release cycles, said Guckenheimer in Redmond, Wash.

The Rosario release of VSTS will follow Orcas, but “it will not be very different in terms of the Visual Studio Pro-level functionality,” Guckenheimer said. “The emphasis will be moving forward on Team System.” Rosario is the follow-on release to VSTS, which is code-named Burton. Orcas will include VSTS/Burton as part of its overall stack. Rosario will be an update to the Team System (VSTS/

Burton) component of the Orcas stack.

“The way to think about what we’re doing is that we went with Team System 2005 from where Visual Studio had been—which was 10 years of focusing on individual productivity, to growing to think about team productivity,” Guckenheimer said. The teams include project managers, testers, architects and database professionals—all roles that VSTS currently does or soon will cover, he said.

And Microsoft continues to grow, thinking from team productivity to organizational productivity, he added. “We live in an organizational environment where, around that extended development team, there are project management offices, chief information officers, business analysts, operations staff and IT pros, support staff, compliance officers, and so forth,” Gucken-heimer said.

Read the full story on eWEEK.com: Microsoft Maps Plans for ‘Rosario’