Microsoft To Buy SourceGear's TeampriseMicrosoft To Buy SourceGear's Teamprise

Microsoft has announced that it is acquiring the Teamprise assets of SourceGear LLC, a software tool maker whose Teamprise unit makes applications that give access to the Visual Studio Team Foundation Server to developers who are working in non-Microsoft environments.

No financial terms of the asset acquisition were disclosed.

Team Foundation Server is the back end server to the Visual Studio Team System, or multi-developer version of Visual Studio. It provides the centralized source code control, work item tracking, system build, or code assembly function and reporting features found in Visual Studio Team System.

Microsoft s plans to integrate Teamprise products into next year's release of Visual Studio 2010, a move that would allow developers using the Eclipse programmers' workbench to access Microsoft's Foundation Server through a Teamprise plug-in.

In effect, Microsoft is making a bid to supply back end services to developers who are not using Visual Studio on a project, or who are using tools in addition to Visual Studio. By providing a connection to Eclipse, Microsoft opens Team Foundation Server for use by a wide variety of C++ and Java programmers whose tools work inside the Eclipse-integrated environment.

"The industry must take steps to make interoperability a stronger business asset for our customers," said S. Somasegar, senior vice president of the Developer Division at Microsoft, in making the announcement Monday.

Somasegar was repeating a theme heard more often these days than in the past from Microsoft. Part of the company's strategy now is to ensure that Windows runs smoothly with other occupants of the data center, including open source code. The Eclipse programmers' workbench is itself open source code, with both commercial and open source tools running inside it.

What's unusual is for Microsoft to make an acquisition to insure that a core product, such as Team Foundation Server, can work with many third party toolsets.

By establishing a plug-in for Eclipse, Team Foundation Server could supply centralized development services to the extensive IBM Rational Application Developer, or the tools that JBoss produced to help build JBoss applications or BEA Systems's Workshop tool to help build WebLogic applications. All three of them work inside Eclipse, as does Adobe System's Flex Builder. JBoss is now owned by Red Hat; BEA Workshop is owned by Oracle.

In addition, the Teamprise tools include Teamprise Explorer, the equivalent of the Teamprise Plug-in For Eclipse in a stand-alone product for developers working outside the Eclipse integrated development environment. Teamprise also makes a Command-Line Client, a non-graphical programmer's interface to be used in entering scripting language code on a command line and tracking and managing it through Team Foundation Server.

In a another cooperative effort with open source code suppliers, Microsoft reached a cooperative pact with the Samba project last year, to insure continued interoperability between it and Windows machines. Samba links Linux to Windows by making files interchangeable. It's also cooperated with Zend Technologies to insure that the PHP open source dynamic language runs efficiently under Windows.

Visual Studio 2010 is currently available for free download in an unsupported, second beta release.

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