Spruce 1.1 released

I’ve just released a new minor version of Spruce - my open source ASP.NET MVC project for Team Foundation Server. The minor increment fixes a few issues, but also (barring bug fixes) ends the development cycle of the project. I’m not planning on adding any new features or support for new work items to Spruce in the future. It’s now got support for MS Agile’s Bugs, Tasks, Issue work items and doesn’t support the other three work items.

I’m hoping we get a pleasant surprise with the next version of Team Foundation Server, with a UI that moves away from the awful Office/OWA style to something that matches modern DVC websites, like you find with Github, Bitbucket and to some degree Codeplex. Infact if they shipped the Codeplex interface with TFS it would be an improvement. I know Microsoft were recruiting for WPF developers for their TFS team so there’s promise there, but they’re behind the whole Ruby/Google/Amazon/Git/NoSQL crowd in establishing their presence in the format of a diverse online toolset for developers. You get MSDN.com and the MVC team’s efforts and that’s about it. Appharbor.com and TeamBuild Server are examples of holes that have been plugged by other companies when Microsoft themselves could probably produce an awesome product, instead of being stuck in the early noughties Winforms world and flogging the dead Silverlight horse.

Anyway ranting aside, Spruce can be found at Codeplex.

I'm Chris Small, a software engineer working in London. This is my tech blog. Find out more about me via Github, Stackoverflow, Resume