Those of you out there who, like us, aren't in the habit of lighting cigars with $100 bills and therefore can't afford Microsoft's Visual Studio Team System, have probably looked at FogBugz from Joel Spolsky's Fog Creek Software. It's a great little HTML-based bug and feature-request tracking application.

When you pair FogBugz with a source control system like SourceGear's Vault, you end up with an integrated solution that's much like VSTS. Vault can actually talk to FogBugz (or vice-versa) so that check-ins can be associated with open cases etc. Great for finding out what work went into fixing a certain bug.

The only missing functionality from this pairing has been integration with the Visual Studio IDE. Vault integrates nicely - you can check in, check out, compare versions etc from the Solution Explorer. FogBugz, however, has never had an integration story with Visual Studio. Until now!

Today Joel announced a Visual Studio 2005 Add-In for FogBugz! I've installed it, and it works really well. You can view cases from within Visual Studio, and pop them open in VS's in-built browser window, like this:

As an affordable alternative to VSTS, the FogBugz/Vault combo is now hard to beat.