Microsoft announced Visual Studio 2017 general availability this year, and we are excited to share that starting with the Rational Team Concert 6.0.4 release, Rational Team Concert is integrated with Microsoft Visual Studio 2017.

Unlike previous versions, Visual Studio 2017 came with some breaking changes to the extensibility mechanism which made it more than just a “test and bless” activity for us. We had to make changes with the way our installer detected the presence of Visual Studio versions, install via VSIX instead of creating registry entries from Installation Manager, and allow installing on all Visual Studio 2017 instances present in the user’s machine. This was because, unlike previous versions, multiple isolated instances of Visual Studio 2017 can co-exist with each having its own private registry.

We’ve worked with the 2017 release candidates along with any subsequent updates, as well as the different Visual Studio editions, to test and learn. We’ve worked directly with Microsoft to work around limitations that came with Visual Studio 2017. And as always, we have been self-hosting on the latest version of Visual Studio.

Rational Team Concert Client for Microsoft Visual Studio 2017

Download the latest Rational Team Concert 6.0.4 offering to try out this integration. You can always ask questions in the forum and submit work items if you need to. Please note that Rational Team Concert continues to work with Visual Studio 2010 and higher.

We are pleased to share that we’ve already had a couple of customers who tried out the milestone release and have given us a positive feedback.

Based on a number of customer requests, we have back ported the support to 6.0.3 too. If you are on 6.0.3, and want the Visual Studio 2017 integration, we have an interim fix available on Fix Central. This is built on top of Rational Team Concert client for Microsoft Visual Studio IDE 6.0.3 ifix005. Please note, you will need an IBMid to download the package. Be sure to go through the included readme.txt before proceeding with installation.

Finally, the integration does come with some limitations:

• IBM Installation Manager does not detect Microsoft Visual Studio 2017 when it is installed
• Rational Team Concert client is not installed on all instances of Microsoft Visual Studio 2017
• Extensions should not be disabled or uninstalled from Microsoft Visual Studio 2017

Priyadarshini Gorur
Technical Lead, Rational Team Concert .NET Clients, Persistent Systems,
priyadarshini_gorur@persistent.com, priya_gorur@in.ibm.com

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