In an earlier post I indicated that I would be helping out on a project called NTeam.  You can read about it in eWeek, but basically, the idea is that smaller development teams are going to need a viable alternative to Team System.

Quite the contrary of what Chris Menegay seems to think, this is not an effort to spite Microsoft, or even to compete with Microsoft.  This is a community effort to provide a team development system for the developers that are clearly not the target of Team System.  No, out of the gate NTeam is not going to be as polished as Team System.  It’s also not some commercial mega-product that is going to cost you thousands of dollars. 

We want a way to glue together all of the open source productivity tools out there, and maybe roll a few new ones, to help you (and us…I know I’ll sure as hell be dogfooding it) be more productive than you would be if you were using the same tools (example: NUnit, CruiseControl, NCover, NDoc, and SubVersion) disparately and cobbled together.  When VSTS comes out, I’ll still be on .Net 1.1, and I’ll still need the open source tools out there for my unit testing, my source control, my collaboration.  I’m sure I’m not alone.  This is why the need for a project like NTeam.

So, even if you can’t dedicate the time to help work on the project, you can be a huge help by letting us know what your expectations of such a system would be.  What kind of features, what kind of support for what activities, and so on.  Feel free to leave comment or send email and I’ll pass anything you have to say on.