Today, we have two things to celebrate. First is the fact that we just released a beta version of Team Explorer Everywhere 2010 SP1. Brian Harry has an excellent write up over on his blog. I’ll be diving into more details of this release soon in some follow-up posts, but please give it a go and let us know what you think.
The second reason to celebrate is that today marks our one year anniversary at Microsoft.
Once the Teamprise acquisition was completed, the transition of the core development team to working in Microsoft has been a remarkably successful one. I remember seeing some sobering facts from the Microsoft Mergers and Acquisitions people during our initial discussions explaining how un-likely it was that an acquisition would be successful. We had several factors in our favor; We joined a great team in the TFS and Visual Studio with management that were very supportive and committed to ensuring an excellent experience for Eclipse and Cross-platform developers. When the core development team came over from Teamprise, our group was infused with some excellent talent from the existing TFS development group and so that really helped us get up to speed with the Microsoft way’s of working. We also had some very tight deadlines to hit which meant the new team bonded very quickly around the common enemy of the impending TFS 2010 ship date. As we’d worked so closely with the team for many years as a partner (and with me as an MVP) we already knew the right people to talk to about technology stuff – the only hard bit was learning all the new admin tasks and processes that are in place inside Microsoft.
Despite the fact that we were close partners before, actually being part of the team is really helping the product shape itself in so many ways to become an even better solution for heterogeneous development. I’m very hopeful that we continue to show this by our actions in what we have released since the acquisition and the shape of our releases to come.
I’ll always look back on the Teamprise experience and the people I got to work with in great fondness, but the future for Team Explorer Everywhere from Microsoft looks very bright. Not only are we working well as an integrated team so soon after acquisition but people seem to like using our product – what more can you ask for.
Anyway, enough about us. Please do give the latest release of Team Explorer Everywhere a try and let us know what you think.
