Earlier today I had lunch with a client, with both an
enterprise Java development team and a Microsoft .NET team, who was considering
to adopt Visual Studio Team System with the Team Foundation Server. A question
that came up was if it was possible to integrate Team Foundation Server with
the popular Eclipse development
environment. Eclipses huge success is largely due to its plug-in architecture
which easily enables software vendors and developers to extend the development
environment. And since the Team Foundation Server exposes its functionality
through Web Services, I concluded that atleast it would be possible to
integrate the two.
I occasionally use Eclipse for some
small Java-projects, as well as experimenting with Java to .NET Web Service
interoperability, so I decided to google for such a plug-in. Unfortunately, no
plug-in is readily available, but I came across a project on SourceForge called
VSTSEclipse aiming to build a
Team Foundation Server plug-in. The project founders are Joe Sango and David Lemphers, and
they’ve got Jon Box, Mitch Denny and Martin Woodward involved. At present the
project is in its planning stage, but I hope it will get moving soon cause this
is one plug-in I’d really like to have.