PureCM has announced what it calls a major update of its change and configuration management Visual Studio client with enhanced version control capabilities, task tracking functions and extra release planning power.

Attempting to align its own technology closer to the large number of developers conscribed to the Microsoft development mantra, PureCM wants to provide lifecycle development within Visual Studio including the scheduling and assigning of tasks, the option to create team and private branches -- and 'check-pointing' code changes and checking on project progress.

"Being able to perform all relevant development tasks within Visual Studio is a major productivity factor for development teams," said Stephen Worthington, development manager at PureCM. "Traditionally, Visual Studio integrations have focused on version control tasks only, such as checkout/checkin and file history. This is no longer sufficient, as agile teams want to work with integrated task tracking and flexible branching and merging to support ever shorter iterations."

The company says that significant development time has been invested into achieving performance enhancements for large teams and that PureCM Professional facilitates parallel development and encourages private branches with its auto-creation and customizable auto-merge support.

The latest performance enhancements now allow teams to work with thousands of branches and keep them up to date automatically by virtue of a the new background merging functionality. Additionally, support for 64 bit installations on Windows has been added.

The company says that PureCM 2010-1 is available in two editions: PureCM Standard and PureCM Professional, the latter coming with agile release planning, task tracking and SCM automation. Both editions include the version control core, and integration with Visual Studio and Eclipse.