Team System and open source

7 February, 2008. It was a Thursday.

A note to all open source developers in .NET:

DO NOT use any exclusive Team System features in your open source projects!

Team System and the Team Edition flavors do not mix with open source projects. I opened up the SDC Tasks Library on CodePlex and was greeted by this fun message:

Since I am using Visual Studio 2005 Professional, I can’t open the “Test” project containing all of the tests. This is unacceptable and borderline insulting. No one except users of Team System can even open the project. Only some of the Team Edition installations can open this project type. There’s not even anything interesting about this project, it just contains unit tests!

In VS 2008, Test Projects are included with the Professional edition. That means that Express edition users will be out of luck too.

If you’re developing open source libraries, all assembly dependencies should be included in your source repository. If the license for the dependent assembly doesn’t allow for redistribution, don’t depend on it. Pick something else.

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