Edward Thomson

Recently Jesse Houwing, one of the Team Foundation Server MVPs, wrote a helpful blog post outlining client/server compatibility in TFS. One of the interesting points in this list is that our cross-platform TFS tooling, Team Explorer Everywhere, is compatible with a wide range of TFS servers, going all the way back to the first version of Team Foundation Server. Having worked with this team for many years now, this isn't surprising to me; this is a team that takes compatibility very seriously.

Brian Harry recently announced our preview of Team Foundation Server hosted on Windows Azure. I'm happy to add that the Team Explorer Everywhere team has developed a preview of our cross-platform client for the hosted TFS Service preview.

We recently introduced the TFS SDK for Java, to allow Java developers to target applications to Team Foundation Server. One of the great features of an SDK for Java is that it allows cross-platform access to TFS.

One of the interesting things about working for Microsoft instead of a tiny little startup company is that they actually expect us to do all the things that people expect out of a software company. For example: Microsoft actually ships localized software! Which means that if you're in Germany, you actually get dialogs and buttons and other widgets in German. I suppose this is something that those crazy Germans have come to expect, but it was quite a revelation to this programmer who grew up in the redneckier parts of Illinois and thinks that the French road signs in Canada are quite exotic.

Yesterday we released the beta of the first service pack of Team Explorer Everywhere, and while a service pack is just supposed to be a roll-up of bugfixes, we managed to sneak in some great new features.

We've finally announced the release of Team Explorer Everywhere 2010 and now that we're finally done, I can say without any hesitance that this is the proudest I've ever been to have shipped a product. Yes, we've added a lot of new features, but I'm much more proud of the huge increase in quality... that almost didn't happen.

Here we are a brief four months into the Microsoft's acquisition of Teamprise, and already we're announcing our first beta release!