Well, while Visual Studio guys catch 2010 Beta 1 installation bugs and explain users how to deal with the problems, I’ll quickly go and have a look of what else future VSTS 2010 users may expect from it.

Frankly, I admire the VSTS team, for the work they’ve done about TFS 2010 version seems really fascinating. There’ve been lots of improvements and new features introduced in almost every Visual Studio area.

Here are some more, i’ve read about lately:

First, there are improvements in project management. Starting with Work Item Tracking, where there’s been introduced the ability to break down work items into hierarchies, custom link types allowing a user to define one of 4 link “topologies”:

• Network –Any two items can be connected and the link has the same name at both ends.
• Tree – A hierarchical link type that defines a “parent/child” relationship. A parent can have many children but a child can only have one parent of a given tree link type.
• Dependency – A directed graph where links connect work items but there can’t be a cycle.
• Directed network – kind of a half way type between network and dependency. There are no constraints on what or how many work items can be related but each end of the link has a unique name (e.g. Tests & Tested By)

Then, there come link queries and new links control. Moreover, there are a bunch of other work item control improvements in addition to the links control including HTML control, link labels, edit, and labels.

Field comparison and group membership queries have been introduced. In TFS 2010, work item query clauses can compare fields with each other, while in previous versions they could only compare a field against a constant. And it’s now possible to easily write queries that filter by groups of people. A new feature called query folders allows organizing queries into folders both under My Queries and under Team Queries. Further, under Team Queries, one can delegate permissions to the sub folders to whomever they like.

Then, some more project management features, including:

Successor/Predecessor – Now with the user definable link types, there’s a possibility to define a link type to represent successor/predecessor relationships and round trip them between TFS and project as well.
Rollups – The work was done to make the project summary tasks and the calculations that Project does round trip well with TFS.
Undo – One now can undo changes made in an MS Project workbook that is bound to TFS. In previous versions undo was disabled due to difficulty coordinating the undo across MS Project and TFS data.

There is also the introduction of 4 dashboards (Work Progress, Product Quality, Test Progress and Build Quality) easy to customize, improved excel services and new reporting features, and many more.

The detailed overviews are here and here.

There’ve been also talks about democratizing application lifecycle management. An emphasis will be put on better cooperation between business, development departments and test departments. Thus all the members of a development organization will be brought into the application development life cycle, and many of the existing barriers to integration will be removed.