Brian Harry has recently blogged about what we can expect to see in the upcoming service pack for Team Foundation Server. The one that interests me most directly is the “Extranet support” that will allow us to use basic auth over SSL for remote connections to TFS thus removing the current need for a VPN. Here’s a rundown from his blog post;

Version Control, WorkItem Tracking and Datawarehouse performance/scale improvements – the majority of these have come from our continued internal deployment.  You can read one of my earlier blog posts for more detail on what kinds of things we’ve hit and addressed.  We’re now seeing great results on our internal servers with these fixes.

 

“Extranet support” – We implemented an ISAPI filter that will allow the intranet to use NTLM and integrated auth while the extra net uses basic auth.  This enables TFS to be more easily deployed in environments where people on the internet need to be able to access TFS without having VPN.

 

WIT Custom Control support – This is a cool new feature.  It is a mechanism by which people can design work item forms that host custom controls.  The data behind the controls can either be persisted in WIT fields or elsewhere.  I’m hoping people go crazy with it and build some awesome custom controls.

 

Bug fixes for Office 2007 (Project and Excel – no Sharepoint 2007 support yet), Vista and the new WAP project support – These were all things that were pretty far from shipping when we shipped so it was not possible to work out all the kinks (bugs on both sides).  Now that  they are much closer and more stable we’ve been able to make them work well.

 

Bug fixes for Dr. Watson reports – We’ve been collecting and analyzing all of the crashes  that have been uploaded through Dr. Watson.  We fixed the top offenders that accounted for a significant majority of all crashes that customers have experienced/reported.