Announcements at TechEd USA 2011 about TFS vNext and a Java API available now

Watching the keynote of TechEd 2011 there were some interesting announcements on the vNext for TFS (the TFS section starts about 1:20 into the keynote).

  • Storyboarding Assistant – A new product using PowerPoint as the core tools to gather requirements
  • New web based dashboard to help manage requirement work items, with loads of drag and drop and pulling much of the functionality of the current Excel planning workbooks into the browser.
  • A new web based taskboard (that was demo’d using a huge touch screen monitor)
  • Giving the developer a task oriented means to say what work they are working on, and behind the scenes setting their workspace appropriately
  • New tooling to allow users to provide feedback on the release in an MTM like style
  • Also mentioned was code review tooling, intellitrace in production and much more…

Have a look at the keynote (the video is available now) and breakout session video streams when they appear. Also there is more detail on Jason Zanders blog

Also announced today was that the Java version of for TFS has been released, so you can now port all the home grown tools you have development for TFS in .NET to Java, so they can be enjoyed irrespective of your development platform.