Accentient has been contracted by Microsoft to design the first Microsoft Official Curriculum (MOC) course for Visual Studio Team System (VSTS).  VSTS is one of the most compelling new technologies to come out of Microsoft since .NET.  It allows developers, testers, architects and even program managers to work together to build software.  Now, these types of systems are nothing new.  What IS new is the fantastic integration with Visual Studio, and the was development metrics are collected and reported.  One of the reasons developers tend to hate team tools, is that they have to open up a different application and enter things like “I'm XX% done”.  That tends to be both a hassle for the developers and a source of errors (developers seem to spend over half of any given development project at an internal estimate that they are 80% complete).  VSTS does most of this tracking automatically.  VSTS isn't just a reporting tool though; it has other wonderful features!  It brings Test Driven Development into the mainstream.  Many developers have learned the wonders of NUnit for unit testing.  VSTS now brings unit testing into the development environment.  Plus, it's extensible, so you can still use many of the unit testing tools you've gotten used to.  I'm not going to enumerate all the wonders of VSTS now, but I'll create a searchable category on this blog for “Team System”.  Come back for more posts!