Also in the Microsoft development tools realm, Teamprise (http://www.teamprise.com/) on Tuesday began offering a maintenance upgrade to its Teamprise Client Suite. Teamprise's offering enables developers working on non-Microsoft-specific platforms, such as Linux, Eclipse, or Java, to utilize Microsoft's Visual Studio 2005 Team Foundation Server workflow collaboration engine for application lifecycle management.

Version 1.1 of Teamprise features support for NTLM (Windows NT LAN Manager) Version 2 authentication as well as the capability to be deployed on Intel-based Macintosh clients. The subsequent Version 2.0 release, due in October, expands source control functionality and lets work items be fully edited and created from inside the Eclipse IDE, said Corey Steffen, general manager at Teamprise.

Version 2.0 will enable creation of new bug reports and it supports the branch and shelf features for source control. Branch allows for making copies of source code in the repository; shelf is a way for an individual developer to save changes.

Teamprise provides the ability to use Team Foundation Server as a unified repository for software projects being developed on multiple platforms.

"Basically, what we're finding is most of the large enterprise corporations of the world have a large percentage of .Net developers inside the corporation, but they also have a large percentage of either Java developers or Linux developers and they want to be able to standardize on this," Steffen said.