Visual Studio Community Technology Preview May 2004 - Installed!

I had some initial trouble installing the May Community Technology Preview (CTP), but after reading the instructions (what a novel idea!) I realised that I just needed to remove all the March components: MSDN, J#, framework, and Visual Studio (VS). Keep an eye on this when you install it, since it doesn't give you much information in the error messages.

I helped give a talk at the Melbourne .Net User Group last night about the new VS Team System (nee: Burton), and so I was really looking forward to using the tools that I had learned so much about. I'm pleased to report that it really is as simple to use and powerful as the website and the videos suggest.

The web testing tool in VSTS is excellent. It is very simple to use and should support a wide variety of web applications. I tried it on a web application containing ASP.Net, plain HTML, Macromedia Flash, and Javascript and it worked beautifully first time. Web tests can be created either by demonstration (recording), or by hand coding in C# and VB.Net. The recording feature enables any VS user to create automated regression tests very quickly. I know a couple of people that will be very interested in the ability to automate their manual regression testing.

Over the next week I'll post some more information about the changes I notice from the March CTP and some more information about the VSTS client tools.