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Jennifer deJong from SDTimes called me a couple weeks ago to ask me about how Team System would influence my “must-have” list of tools I wrote about last year in MSDN magazine. The SDTimes article is now available online and I thought I would re-iterate some of my views here.

1)FxCop is now going to be built into Visual Studio (I am not sure which versions, but at least Team System) so that takes FxCop off the list.

2)Nunit is also obviously in danger because of the unit testing in Team System, but I am sure it will still be the choice of users of regular versions of Visual Studio.

3)Nant is probably in danger as well because of MS-Build and the build capabilities built into Team System.

Other than that most of the other tools remain unaffected. I could see the DSL tools affecting the use of CodeSmith for generating frameworks, but I have to learn more about them first.

Now about Team System itself, my two main gripes are:

1) I hate how it is divided by role. I can see myself needing the design tools of the architect and the unit testing abilities of developer.

2) Since I can see myself needing the suite and not just a single edition the price is pretty high. The price for a single edition is completely reasonable, but the suite edition should be cheaper.

I know it is really easy to say something should be cheaper when you are not the one paying the bills, but I don’t think lowering the price of the suite edition would affect the revenue from the product that much. Lowering the price of the suite could even increase revenue as you could entice more people to upgrade from a single edition.

-James