Orcas, a planned major upgrade to Microsoft’s Visual Studio application development platform, also encompasses the company’s application lifecycle management products, too.These include Visual Studio Team System and its collaboration server component, Team Foundation Server, said Brian Harry, Microsoft product unit manager for Team Foundation Server, at the SD West 2007 conference on Monday evening in Santa Clara, Calif. Microsoft plans to ship Orcas later this year. While Harry did not offer details on what to expect on the Team System client side, he noted improvements are planned for Team Foundation Server such as continuous integration build support and enhancements in setup, administration and operations. Also planned is improved performance. “We’re doing a whole bunch of really good stuff,” Harry said. Drop management, which is the ability to determine how long specific drops, or builds, of applications stay around during the development process, is planned for Orcas. This helps clean up disk space, said Harry. After the Orcas release, Microsoft plans to bolster the collaboration server with the ability to manage Team Foundation Server server farms as a single server, to boost convenience. Software Development