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Picking an appropriate version of Visual Studio Team System for your team to use has always been an interesting proposition. The full Team Suite edition is outside the price range of most projects, and you have to make sure that the majority of your team will be able to see all of the artifacts with minimal trouble. Using features such as the infrastructure diagramming tools or database projects can often mean that you have one machine capable of performing that function, which can act as an annoying bottleneck for your team.

The choice of product becomes an even tougher question if you are a Microsoft Gold Partner (with ISV or CDS competency), as Gold Partners have traditionally gotten a certain number of VSTS Developer Edition licenses as part of their partner pack. This is great, but it makes it really hard to justify the cost of another version of VSTS. Other versions are now $4000 dollars more expensive than Developer edition, rather than all of the editions being the same price.

I have always maintained that, bang for buck, VSTS Database Edition is the best value for money out of all the VSTS editions, and, given a choice, I would pick this for every member of the team so that they could all use the database source control feature. It’s the feature I always miss whenever I don’t have the full Team Suite edition of Visual Studio installed.

There was much rejoicing, then, when I found this lovely little tidbit on the MS Partner site.

Certified Partners who have earned either ISV and/or CDS Competency are upgraded to Microsoft Visual Studio Team System 2008 Development Edition with MSDN Premium Subscription. Starting 1 October, 2008, these Certified Partners will be able to download VSTS Database Edition from MSDN Subscriber Downloads as part of their upgrade to VSTS Development Edition with MSDN Premium Subscription.

It seems that we now get the choice between VSTS Developer Edition and VSTS Database Edition. I for one am extremely happy with this news. Test Edition and Architect Edition have some nice features (most notably the performance testing tools in Test Edition which run rings around the old Application Centre Test product that came with 2003), but for me these two products cover the majority of the Team Suite features that most development teams would need.