Scott Guthrie has an interesting insight into the software management processes at Microsoft for the Whidbey team.   http://weblogs.asp.net/scottgu/archive/2004/10/23/246709.aspx.  Some points I picked up on: My team currently has 102,000 test cases which test 505,000 different test scenarios Zero Bug Bounce: a point in time when we have no bugs older than 48 hours in a given milestone Tell Mode: teams within our division are still given discretion to fix any bugs they want – they just need to be prepared to present and explain why they choose the ones they did to the central division ship room. Ask Mode, teams within our division...

Microsoft have anounced that c# is going to have Edit and Continue support - a long wanted feature for vb.net'ers who lost the feature after VB6, and will gain it again in Whidbey. http://blogs.msdn.com/somasegar/archive/2004/10/15/242853.aspx I have heard some people state things along the lines of "real programmers don't need edit and continue" - these sort of arguments about "real programmers" I am always suspicious of, and in this case I think the argument is pretty slim.  Sure if you are doing Test Driven Development, then you reduce the need to debug, but you don't eliminate it completely, and E&C is another tool available to...

If you want to get a good overview of what's in Team Studio 2005, without installing the Beta and spending a significant amount of time playing with it, then a good start is to take a look at the TechEd 2004 General Session Demo video, which is available from here: http://www.shrinkster.com/1j7  

I hadn't spotted this download from Microsoft before, but it's worth a look to give you a headstart on any of the topics that are covered. Get it for free from here: http://www.microsoft.com/downloads/details.aspx?FamilyId=08E3D5F8-033D-420B-A3B1-3074505C03F3&displaylang=en