The StarTeam Visual Studio Plugin is tightly coupled with the Microsoft Visual Studio development environment. Start Visual Studio and the integration features are immediately available using the StarTeam main menu or by using context menus in the Solution Explorer.
Initially, you will either:
The Place Solution, Pull Solution, and Pull Project menu commands open a dialog box where you can configure the StarTeam Server configuration settings.
Using this integration, you can implement version control, change management, and other important functions from within Visual Studio. You can easily use these capabilities, as StarTeam adds its own menu commands to Visual Studio. For those who are accustomed to working with the full-featured, standalone StarTeam Cross-Platform Client, there is an embedded client provided within the Visual Studio environment enabling you to work directly in the IDE with StarTeam, much as you would if working in the standalone client itself.
The StarTeam Visual Studio Plugin enables each team member to:
Develop applications in the preferred development environment while simultaneously using version control.
Check out revisions (usually the most recent, or tip, revisions), modify them, and check them back in without losing the earlier revisions or anyone else's work.
Link each file to a StarTeam change request, requirement, or task as part of the process of adding or checking in that file.
The team leader can:
Keep track of who checked in which files and when.
Keep track of which file revisions contain the changes needed to complete a specific change request, requirement, or task.
Additionally, the entire team can store everything related to a product in one location.
The StarTeam Visual Studio Plugin connects to the StarTeam Server by using the TCP/IP (Sockets) protocol. This protocol must be configured properly to allow successful connection to the server.
The StarTeam Visual Studio Plugin brings the following main components to the Visual Studio environment: