Visual Studio vs Visual Studio Team Services: What are the differences?
Visual Studio is a powerful integrated development environment (IDE), while Visual Studio Team Services (now known as Azure DevOps) is a comprehensive set of collaboration tools for software development and DevOps practices. Let's explore the key differences between them.
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Pricing Model: Visual Studio is a licensed software that developers need to purchase and install individually on their local machines. In contrast, Visual Studio Team Services follows a subscription-based model where users pay a monthly fee for access to the services and tools provided by the platform.
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Collaboration and Project Management: Visual Studio Team Services is designed to support collaboration and project management in a team-based environment. It provides features such as work tracking, code reviews, and team dashboards that enable teams to coordinate and manage their work effectively. Visual Studio, on the other hand, is primarily focused on providing a development environment for individual developers rather than team collaboration.
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Source Control Integration: Visual Studio Team Services offers built-in integration with Git and allows teams to manage their source code within the platform. It provides features like branching, merging, and pull requests that simplify the code management process. While Visual Studio also supports Git integration, it is not as comprehensive as what is offered by Visual Studio Team Services.
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Continuous Integration and Delivery: Visual Studio Team Services provides robust support for continuous integration and delivery (CI/CD) processes. It offers features like build automation, release management, and testing tools that facilitate the implementation of CI/CD pipelines. Visual Studio, on the other hand, is more focused on the development aspect and does not provide the same level of CI/CD capabilities.
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Extensibility and Marketplace: Visual Studio has a vast ecosystem of extensions and plugins that developers can leverage to enhance their development experience. The Visual Studio Marketplace offers a wide range of tools, libraries, and frameworks that can be easily integrated into the development environment. Visual Studio Team Services also has its own marketplace but the focus is more on tools and extensions related to project management and collaboration.
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Hosting and Infrastructure: Visual Studio Team Services provides cloud-based hosting for source code, build artifacts, and other project-related assets. This allows teams to access and collaborate on their projects from anywhere with an internet connection. Visual Studio, on the other hand, relies on local infrastructure and does not provide the same level of cloud-based hosting capabilities.
In summary, Visual Studio serves as a feature-rich IDE for coding, debugging, and building applications, providing a robust environment for individual developers. Visual Studio Team Services, now integrated into Azure DevOps, extends the collaboration to include version control, continuous integration, release management, and other DevOps functionalities, making it a centralized platform for collaborative software development and delivery.
