1427 Professional Team Foundation Server 2012

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PROFESSIONAL

TEAM FOUNDATION SERVER 2012

INTRODUCTION . . . .xxvii

⊲ PART I

GETTING STARTED

CHAPTER 1 Introducing Team Foundation Server 2012 . . . 3

CHAPTER 2 Planning a Deployment . . . .13

CHAPTER 3 Installation and Conﬁ guration . . . 43

CHAPTER 4 Connecting to Team Foundation Server . . . 59

⊲ PART II

VERSION CONTROL

CHAPTER 5 Overview of Version Control . . . 83

CHAPTER 6 Using Team Foundation Version Control . . . 95

CHAPTER 7 Ensuring Code Quality . . . .147

CHAPTER 8 Migration from Legacy Version Control Systems . . . .177

CHAPTER 9 Branching and Merging . . . 193

CHAPTER 10 Common Version Control Scenarios . . . 223

⊲ PART III PROJECT MANAGEMENT

CHAPTER 11 Introducing Work Item Tracking . . . 243

CHAPTER 12 Customizing Process Templates . . . 273

CHAPTER 13 Managing Teams and Agile Planning Tools . . . 311

CHAPTER 14 Reporting and SharePoint Dashboards . . . 333

CHAPTER 15 Project Server Integration . . . 359

⊲ PART IV TEAM FOUNDATION BUILD

CHAPTER 16 Overview of Build Automation . . . 373

CHAPTER 17 Using Team Foundation Build . . . 389

CHAPTER 18 Customizing the Build Process . . . 437

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CHAPTER 21 Disaster Recovery . . . 549

CHAPTER 22 Security and Privileges . . . 575

CHAPTER 23 Monitoring Server Health and Performance . . . 599

CHAPTER 24 Testing and Lab Management . . . 627

CHAPTER 25 Upgrading from Earlier Versions . . . 657

CHAPTER 26 Working with Geographically Distributed Teams . . . 675

CHAPTER 27 Extending Team Foundation Server . . . 695

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PROFESSIONAL

Team Foundation Server 2012

Ed Blankenship

M artin Woodward

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Indianapolis, IN 46256 www.wiley.com

Published simultaneously in Canada

ISBN : 978-1-118-31409-8 ISBN : 978-1-118-43932-6 (ebk) ISBN : 978-1-118-60452-6 (ebk) ISBN : 978-1-118-60460 -1 (ebk)

M anufactured in the United States of America

10 9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1

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Wiley publishes in a variety of print and electronic formats and by print-on-demand. Some material included with standard print versions of this book may not be included in e-books or in print-on-demand. If this book refers to media such as a CD or DVD that is not included in the version you purchased, you may download this material at

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Library of Congress Control N umber: 2012950503

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To M om , D ad, N athan, T iffany, Z ach, D aniel, M ik e,

and G randm a, and to all those on the product team s

that m ak e this an am azing product that positively

im pacts so m any in the softw are engineering

com m unity.

—Ed Blankenship

To Catherine.

—Martin Woodward

To m y w ife, Em m a.

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ABOUT THE AUTHORS

ED BLANKENSHIP works at M icrosoft as the program manager for the Lab and Environment M anagement scenarios of the Visual Studio ALM and Team Foundation Server product family. H is expertise with Team Foundation Server and Visual Studio ALM began with the beginnings of the product family nearly seven years ago.

Before joining M icrosoft, Ed was awarded as a M icrosoft M ost Valuable Professional (M VP) for fi ve years. H e was voted in 2010 as the M icrosoft M VP of the Year for Visual Studio ALM and T FS by his peers. Ed was also a T FS consultant and the ALM practice technical lead at Imaginet (formerly N otion Solutions). Prior to consulting, Ed was the Release Engineering M anager at Infragistics, where he led a multiyear Team Foundation Server and Visual Studio Team System implementation globally to improve the development process life cycle.

Ed has authored and served as technical editor for several Wrox books. H e has also authored numerous articles and spoken at various user groups, events, radio shows, and conferences, includ-ing TechEd N orth America. You can fi nd him sharinclud-ing his experiences at his technical blog at

www.edsquared.com and on Twitter with his handle @EdBlankenship.

MARTIN WOODWARD is a senior program manager for M icrosoft Visual Studio Team Foundation Server specializing on the Eclipse and Cross-Platform Tooling. Before joining M icrosoft, M artin was awarded M VP of the Year for Visual Studio Application Lifecycle M anagement and he has spoken about Team Foundation Server at events internationally. W hen not working or speaking, M artin can be found on his blog at http://www.wood-wardweb.com or on the podcast at

http://radiotfs.com.

GRANT HOLLIDAY is a senior premier fi eld engineer (PFE) for M icrosoft Services in Australia. As a PFE, he works with customers to perform proactive health checks and workshops on Team Foundation Server. Prior to this role, he spent three years in Redmond, Washington, as a Program M anager in the Visual Studio Team Foundation Server product group. H e was responsible for the internal T FS server deployments at M icrosoft, including the largest and busiest T FS server in the world used by Developer Division. Grant was also involved in the early stages of getting the Team Foundation Service up and running on the Windows Azure platform. Grant shares his thoughts on his blog at

http://blogs.msdn.com/granth and presentations at industry events.

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ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

I WANT TO THANK everyone involved with putting this book together, including the author team, editors, reviewers, and everyone who was able to give us great feedback and help along the way! Thanks to M artin, Grant, Brian, and Steve for the great teamwork and contributions that have made this book awesome. I have really appreciated you guidance along the way as well as all of the new things that I learned from each of your expertise. I truly enjoyed working with y’all.

The help from the each of the product teams to put together such a great product can’t be dis-counted either. A personal thanks to Brian H arry, Sam Guckenheimer, M att M itrik, M ario Rodriguez, Anu, M uthu, Aseem, N ipun, Satinder, Gregg Boer, Jim Lamb, Jason Prickett, Chad Boles, Phillip Kelley, Christophe Fiessinger, and Chris Patterson on the product teams at M icrosoft. I appreciate all of your contributions, advice, and primarily your in-depth insight into the product over the years that has helped develop a better understanding of all the moving wheels of Team Foundation Server.

I also want to thank my former M icrosoft M VP colleagues who have been a great group to be a part of, as well as to work with now. A special thanks goes to M ike Fourie, Tiago Pascoal, Anthony Borton, Steve Godbold, M ickey Gousset, Steve St. Jean, Chris M enegay, Dave M cKinstry, Joel Semeniuk, Adam Cogan, and N eno Loje for all of your help.

Thank you to everyone who has helped me throughout my career over the years. Thanks for pushing me to get better in my craft, and for fueling my enthusiasm. Thanks also to my family and friends for their guidance along the way and their constant support. I couldn’t have done this without each of you.

—Ed Blankenship

FIRST, I WOULD LIKE to thank my coauthors, Ed, Grant, and Brian, for allowing me to help them in putting this book together. I would also like to thank Steve St. Jean for his help and his attention to detail. You will struggle to meet a group of folks who know the breadth of Team Foundation Server better than these guys do, and it is a pleasure to work with them all.

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apart or vacation days messed up due to my husband not understanding the term work /life bal-ance.” H owever, luckily for me she’s a woman who keeps her promises. And I aim to spend the rest of my days trying to make her understand how grateful I am. For everything.

—Martin Woodward

I’D LIKE TO THANK everyone who made this book possible. O nce again, we formed the dream team of Team Foundation Server knowledge and experience. Thank you to my coauthors, Ed, M artin, Steve, and Brian. Thank you to the Wiley project team for keeping us on track and helping with the polish and production effort that a technical book like this deserves.

Secondly, I’d like to thank the M icrosoft Services team in Australia and the worldwide Premier Field Engineering team. As I returned home after some time in Corp, you have welcomed me with open arms into your organizations—I am truly honored to call myself a PFE. A big thank you to Brian H arry and the Team Foundation Server team in Redmond and Raleigh. The T FS team are truly world-class in their customer focus and I am lucky to work with such great technical talent.

Fina lly, I’d like to t ha n k my fa m ily for a ll t he late n ights a nd weekends it took to get t h is over t he line.

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PART I: GETTING STARTED

CHAPTER 1: INTRODUCING TEAM FOUNDATION SERVER 2012 3

What Is Team Foundation Server?

3 What’s New in Team Foundation Server 2012

5

Version Control 5

Code Reviews 6

Managing Personal Work 6

Web Access 6

Project Management 7

Agile and Scrum Product Management 7

Stakeholder Feedback 7

Build 7

Acquisition Options

7

Team Foundation Service 8

Express 9

Trial 9

Volume Licensing 10

MSDN Subscriptions 10

Microsoft Partner Network 11

Retail 11

Summary 11

CHAPTER 2: PLANNING A DEPLOYMENT 13

Identifying and Addressing Software Engineering Pain

13

Transparency into the Release or Project 14

Collaboration Across Diff erent Teams and Roles 15

Automated Compilation, Testing, Packaging, and Deployment 15

Managing Test Plans 15

Parallel Development 15

Adopting Team Foundation Server

16

Adoption Timeline 16

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Hosting Team Foundation Server 18

Identifying Aff ected Teams 19

Generating Consensus 19

Team Foundation Server Administrator 20

Pilot Projects 21

Migration Strategies

21

Version Control 21

Work Item Tracking 22

Structuring Team Project Collections and Team Projects

23

Considering Limitations in Team Foundation Server 25

Server Limitations 28

Preparation for a Team Foundation Server Environment

29

Understanding the Architecture and Scale-Out Options 29

Hardware Requirements 32

Virtualization 33

Planning for Software Prerequisites 34

Service Accounts 37

File Share Folders 38

SMTP Server 38

Firewall Concerns and Ports Used 39

Friendly DNS Names 39

Legacy Visual Studio Versions 41

Summary 42

CHAPTER 3: INSTALLATION AND CONFIGURATION 43

What You’ll Need

44

Team Foundation Server 2012 44

Team Foundation Server 2012 Installation Guide 45

SQL Server 2012 45

Operating System 46

SharePoint 46

Client Software 47

Service Packs and Other Updates 47

Installing Team Foundation Server

48 Installation Types

49 Conﬁ guring Team Foundation Server

51 Creating Your First Team Project

56 Conﬁ gure Friendly DNS Names

57

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xiii CONTENTS

CHAPTER 4: CONNECTING TO TEAM FOUNDATION SERVER 59

Team Foundation Server Architecture

59 Addressing Team Foundation Server

61 Introducing Team Foundation Server Security and Roles

63

Users 63 Groups 64 Permissions 65

Team Explorer

65

Understanding Team Explorer in Visual Studio 66

Connecting to Team Foundation Server from Eclipse

and Cross-Platform 71

Alternate Ways to Connect to Team Foundation Server

74

Accessing Team Foundation Server Through a Web Browser 74

Using Team Foundation Server in Microsoft Excel 75

Using Team Foundation Server in Microsoft Project 76

Windows Explorer Integration with Team Foundation Server 77

Connecting Microsoft Test Manager to Team

Foundation Server 78

Access to Team Foundation Server via Third-Party Integrations 79

Summary 80

PART II: VERSION CONTROL

CHAPTER 5: OVERVIEW OF VERSION CONTROL 83

What Is Version Control?

83

Repository 84

Working Copy 85

Working Folder Mappings 85

Get 86 Add 86 Check-out 86 Changeset 87 Check-in 87 History 87

Branching and Merging 88

Common Version Control Products

88

Microsoft Visual SourceSafe 89

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Team Foundation Server 90

Distributed Version Control Systems 91

Summary 93

CHAPTER 6: USING TEAM FOUNDATION VERSION CONTROL 95

Getting Started with Team Foundation

Server Version Control

96 Learning what’s New in Team Foundation

Server 2012 Version Control

98 Team Foundation Server Version Control Concepts

99

Workspace 99

Working Folder Mappings 103

Get 107 Check-out 109 Locks 109

Check-in of Pending Changes 110

Undo Pending Changes 117

Changeset 117 Shelvesets 119 Branches 120

Using Source Control Explorer

121

Viewing History 123

Labeling Files 123

Recovering When Things Go Wrong 124

Keeping on task with My Work

125 Team Foundation Server

Version Control in Eclipse

130

Installing the Team Foundation Server Plug-in for Eclipse 131

Sharing Eclipse Projects in Team Foundation Server 133

Importing Projects from Team Foundation Server 135

Diff erences Between the Eclipse and Visual Studio Clients 137

Team Foundation Server Version Control from

the Command Line 137

Getting Help 138

Using the Command Line 138

Team Foundation Version Control Power Tools

and Third-Party Utilities

139

Microsoft Visual Studio Team Foundation

Server Power Tools 139

Team Foundation Server MSSCCI Provider 140

Conﬁ guring Version Control

140

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xv CONTENTS

Switching Version Control to Team Foundation Server

141

Working with Team Foundation Server for Visual

SourceSafe Users 142

Using Team Foundation Server for Subversion Users 144

Summary 146

CHAPTER 7: ENSURING CODE QUALITY 147

What Is Quality?

148 Enforcing Quality

149 Check-In Policies

149

Monitoring Check-In Policy Overrides 152

Check-In Policy Pack in Power Tools 154

Creating Custom Check-In Policies 155

Deploying Check-In Policies 159

Gated Check-In

164

Why Gated Check-In? 165

When Not to Use Gated Check-In 166

Setting Up a Gated Check-In Build 167

Checking In for Validation 168

Reconciling the Workspace 168

Managing Code Reviews

170

Requesting a Code Review 171

Performing a Code Review 173

Completing the Code Review 175

Summary 176

CHAPTER 8: MIGRATION FROM LEGACY

VERSION CONTROL SYSTEMS 177

Migration Versus Upgrade

178

Upgrade 178 Migration 178

Migrating History or Latest Version

179 Migrating from Visual SourceSafe

180

Preparing to Use the VSS Upgrade Wizard 181

Using the Visual SourceSafe Upgrade Wizard 182

Team Foundation Server Integration

Platform 188

Popular Third-Party Migration Tools

190

Subversion, CVS, and StarTeam 190

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CHAPTER 9: BRANCHING AND MERGING 193

Branching Demystiﬁ ed

193

Branch 194 Merge 194

Conﬂ ict 194

Branch Relationships 195

Baseless Merge 196

Forward/Reverse Integration 196

Common Branching Strategies

196

No Branching 197

Branch per Release 198

Code-Promotion Branching 199

Feature Branching 200

Implementing Branching Strategies

201

The Scenario 202

The Plan 202

Implementation 203

Dealing with Changesets 208

Tracking Change Through Branches 220

Summary 222

CHAPTER 10: COMMON VERSION CONTROL SCENARIOS 223

Setting Up the Folder Structure for Your Branches

223

Application Source Code 224

Automated Tests Source Code 224

Architecture Assets 224

Database Schema 225

Installer Assets 225

Build and Deployment Assets 225

Third-Party Source Code/Dependencies

226

Folder Inside Branch 226

Folder at Team Project Level 228

Internal Shared Libraries

230

Choosing a Location in Version Control 230

Storing Library Assemblies as Dependencies 233

Branching into Product Family Branches 233

Managing Artifacts Using Team Foundation Server

235

SQL Reporting Services Encryption Key Backup 235

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xvii CONTENTS

Custom Build Assemblies 237

Master Build Process Templates 238

Source Code for Custom Tools 238

Summary 239

PART III: PROJECT MANAGEMENT

CHAPTER 11: INTRODUCING WORK-ITEM TRACKING 243

Project Management Enhancements in Team Foundation

Server 2012

244

Rich Work-Item Relationships 244

Test Case Management 245

Enhanced Reporting 245

SharePoint Server Dashboards 246

Agile Planning Tools in Team Web Access 246

Work Items

247

Work-Item Types 247

Areas and Iterations 249

Process Templates

252

MSF for Agile Software Development 253

MSF for CMMI Process Improvement 255

Visual Studio Scrum 258

Third-Party Process Templates 260

Custom Process Templates 260

Managing Work Items

260

Using Visual Studio 260

Using Microsoft Excel 266

Using Microsoft Project 267

Using Team Web Access 268

Using Third-Party Tools 270

Project Server Integration

271 Summary 271

CHAPTER 12: CUSTOMIZING PROCESS TEMPLATES 273

Anatomy of a Process Template

273

Plug-in Files 274

Default Security Groups and Permissions 276

Initial Area and Iteration Nodes 277

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Initial Work Items 289

Work Item Queries and Folders 289

Microsoft Project Column Mappings 290

Version Control Permissions and Settings 290

SharePoint Project Team Portal

Document Library Settings 291

SQL Reporting Services Report Deﬁ nitions 292

Using the Process Template Editor

292

Installing the Process Template Editor 293

Working with a Process Template 293

Using an XML Editor and WITAdmin 294

Deploying Updates to Process Templates

296

Uploading Process Templates in Team

Foundation Server 296

Editing Work Items on an Existing Team Project 297

Customizing Agile Tools

298

Metastates 299

Eff ort, Remaining Work, and Stack Rank 299

Deﬁ ning the Team 300

Other Process Conﬁ guration Customizations 300

Common Work Item Type Customizations

301

Adding New States 301

Displaying Custom Link Types 302

Using Display Name Changes

(New syncnamechanges attribute) 302

Introducing Custom Work Item Controls

303

Work Item Clients 303

Work Item Control Interfaces 304

Deploying Custom Controls 308

Work Item Custom Control Deployment Manifest 309

Using the Custom Control in the Work Item

Type Deﬁ nition 309

Summary 310

CHAPTER 13: MANAGING TEAMS AND AGILE PLANNING TOOLS 311

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xix

CHAPTER 14: REPORTING AND SHAREPOINT DASHBOARDS 333

What’s New in Team Foundation Server 2012

334

Cross-Collection Reporting Support 334

Changes to the Relational Warehouse 334

Changes to the Analysis Services Cube 335

Optional and Richer SharePoint Integration 337

Team Foundation Server Data Warehouse

337

Operational Stores 338

Relational Warehouse Database and Warehouse Adapters 338

Querying the Relational Warehouse Database 339

Analysis Services Cube 342

Data Warehouse Permissions 344

SharePoint Integration

344

SharePoint Extensions 345

Excel Services and Dashboard Compatibility 345

Creating Reports

347

Tools 347

Excel Reporting from a Work-Item Query 347

SQL Server Reporting Services Reports 349

SharePoint Dashboards 355

CHAPTER 15: PROJECT SERVER INTEGRATION 359

Overview 359

Project Server Essentials 360

Bidirectional Synchronization 361

Relationship between Team Projects and Enterprise Projects 366

Initial Conﬁ guration

366

Necessary Permissions 366

Command-Line Tool for Conﬁ guration 367

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One-Time Integration Steps 367

Mapping Enterprise Projects to Team Projects 368

Necessary Software for Project Managers 369

Summary 369

PART IV: TEAM FOUNDATION BUILD

CHAPTER 16: OVERVIEW OF BUILD AUTOMATION 373

Let’s Build Something

373 What Is Build Automation?

374

Scripting a Build 376

Make 376

Apache Ant 377

Apache Maven 378

NAnt 379 MSBuild 379

Windows Workﬂ ow Foundation 383

Using Build Automation Servers

383

CruiseControl 384 CruiseControl.NET 384

Hudson / Jenkins 384

Team Foundation Server 385

Adopting Build Automation

386 Summary 387

CHAPTER 17: USING TEAM FOUNDATION BUILD 389

Introduction to Team Foundation Build

389 Team Foundation Build Architecture

390 Setting up the Team Foundation Build Service

392

Installing Team Foundation Build 393

Conﬁ guring the Team Foundation Build Service 393

Additional Software Required on the Build Agent 399

Working with Builds

399

Creating a Build Deﬁ nition 399

Queuing a Build 411

Build Notiﬁ cations and Alerts 413

Managing Builds 415

Managing Build Quality Descriptions 420

Managing Build Controllers and Build Agents 420

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xxi CONTENTS

DefaultTemplate Process 423

Building Ant and Maven Projects with Team Foundation Server 435

Summary 436

CHAPTER 18: CUSTOMIZING THE BUILD PROCESS 437

Introduction to Windows Workﬂ ow Foundation

438

Visual Basic.NET Expressions 438

Custom Workﬂ ow Variables 440

Custom Build Parameters 442

Workﬂ ow Activities 449

When to Use MSBuild versus WF

457 Custom Build Workﬂ ow Activities

458

How to Create a Custom Build Activity 458

Integrating Activity into the Build Process Template 473

Deployment of Custom Build Activities 478

Customizing the Build Report Output

480

Creating a Log Data Visualizer 480

Build Summary Report Custom Section 481

Customizing the Build Process to Stamp

the Version Number on Assemblies

482

Deﬁ ning Custom Build Process Parameters 483

Allowing the Functionality to Be Optional 484

Deﬁ ning Local Workﬂ ow Variables 485

Initializing the Local Workﬂ ow Variables 486

Finding Matching Assembly Info Files 486

Adding the Custom TfsVersion Activity 487

Summary 488

PART V: ADMINISTRATION

CHAPTER 19: INTRODUCTION TO TEAM FOUNDATION SERVER

ADMINISTRATION 493

Administrative Roles

494

Infrastructure Administrator 494

Team Foundation Server Administrator 494

Project Administrator 494

Logical Architecture

495

Client Tier 496

Application Tier 496

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Built-In Administration Tools

497

Team Foundation Administration Console 498

Command-Line Conﬁ guration Tools 516

Other Administration Tools

519

Team Foundation Server Power Tools 520

Best Practices Analyzer 520

Team Foundation Server Administration Tool 522

Team Foundation Sidekicks 523

Summary 524

CHAPTER 20: SCALABILITY AND HIGH AVAILABILITY 525

An Evolving Architecture

526

Scale Out To Multiple Servers 535

Eliminate Single Points Of Failure 535

Anticipate Growth 535

Keep It Simple 535

Solutions 535

Data Tier 536

Application Tier and Web Access 539

Virtualization 546

Summary 547

CHAPTER 21: DISASTER RECOVERY 549

Business Continuity and Recovery Goals

549 Deﬁ ning Responsibilities

550 Backing Up Team Foundation Server

550

Components to Back Up 551

Types of Database Backups 552

Important Considerations 554

Creating a Backup Plan

556

Team Foundation Server Backup Plan Details 563

Restoring a Backup to the Original Server 566

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xxiii CONTENTS

CHAPTER 22: SECURITY AND PRIVILEGES 575

Users 575

Team Foundation Server Groups 580

Permissions 583

Server Permissions 584

Team Project Collection Permissions 584

Team Project Permissions 586

Deny, Allow, and Unset Permissions 595

Use Active Directory Groups 596

Avoid Granting Individual User Permissions 596

Use Inheritance 596

Tools 597

Command-Line Tools 597

Summary 597

CHAPTER 23: MONITORING SERVER HEALTH

AND PERFORMANCE 599

System Health

600 SQL Server

601

Dynamic Management Views (DMV) 601

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Client Performance Tracing 616

Job History 618

Storage Usage 619

Data Warehouse 621

Tools 621

Performance Analysis of Logs (PAL) Tool 622

Team Foundation Server Best Practices Analyzer (BPA) 623

Team Foundation Server Management Pack for

System Center Operations Manager (SCOM) 624

Summary 625

CHAPTER 24: TESTING AND LAB MANAGEMENT 627

Software Testing

628

Test Case Management 629

Lab Management 629

Testing Architecture

630 Microsoft Test Manager

632

Test Plans 633

Test Suites 634

Test Cases 634

Test Runs 634

Exploratory Testing 636

Actionable Bugs 636

Test Settings 636

Test Attachments Cleaner 638

Assigning a Build to a Test Plan 639

Analyzing Impacted Tests 640

Build Retention 640

Custom Work Item Types 641

Test Automation

641 Visual Studio Lab Management

643

What’s New for Lab Management in

Team Foundation Server 2012 644

Installing and Conﬁ guring Lab Management 645

Maintaining a Healthy Test Lab 652

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xxv CONTENTS

CHAPTER 25: UPGRADING FROM EARLIER VERSIONS 657

Overview 658

In-Place Upgrades Versus Migrating to

New Hardware 658

Planning Upgrades 660

Upgrading Prerequisites

661

SQL Server 662

SharePoint 662

Project Server 663

System Center 663

Using the Conﬁ guration Utility

663

Upgrade Wizard 664

Veriﬁ cation of Upgrade 665

Upgrading Legacy Team Projects

666

Feature Enablement 667

Allowing Access to Premium Features 669

Automated Builds 670

Enable Local Workspaces 672

Deploying New Reports 672

Deploying New SharePoint Team Portal Site 672

Upgrading Lab Management Environments 673

Summary 674

CHAPTER 26: WORKING WITH GEOGRAPHICALLY

DISTRIBUTED TEAMS 675

Identifying the Challenges

676

Latency Over the Wide Area Network (WAN) 676

Sources of Network Traffi c 677

Solutions 679

Central Server with Remote Proxy Servers 679

Multiple Distributed Servers 679

Mirroring 680

Remote Desktops 680

Internet-connected “Extranet” Server 680

Metadata Filtering 680

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Remote Build Server Farm 681

Team Foundation Server Proxy

682

How the Team Foundation Server Proxy Works 682

Compatibility 682

Conﬁ guring Proxies 682

Seeding Proxies 685

Personal Proxies 685

Mirroring with the Team Foundation

Server Integration Tools

686

Maintenance Windows and Time Zones 692

Online Index Operations with SQL Server Enterprise 693

Distributed Application Tiers 693

SQL Mirroring 694

Summary 694

CHAPTER 27: EXTENDING TEAM FOUNDATION SERVER 695

Extensibility Points

696 .NET Client Object Model

697

Connecting to the Server 698

Handling Multiple API Versions 699

Distributing the Client Object Model 701

SOAP Event Subscriptions

701

Available Event Types 702

Building an Endpoint 703

Adding the Subscription 704

Listing All Event Subscriptions1 705

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INTRODUCTION

OVER THE PAST DECADE, M icrosoft has been creating development tools that have been designed for the ever-growing engineering teams of software developers, testers, architects, project managers, designers, and database administrators. In the Visual Studio 2012 line of products, there are tools for each team member to use to contribute to a software release. H owever, it’s not enough to allow for awesome individual contributions. You must also organize the collaboration of those contributions across the larger team, including the stakeholders for whom the software is being built.

Beginning in the Visual Studio 2005 release, M icrosoft introduced a new server product named Team Foundation Server to complement its development products. N ow in its fourth release, Team Foundation Server 2012 has grown with all of the investment from the past decade and fi ts nicely in the Visual Studio applicationlifecyclem anagem ent (A L M) family of products. Before the Visual Studio 2010 release, the Visual Studio ALM family of products was given the brand of Visual Studio Team System, which is no longer used in the latest releases.

As you will fi nd out, Team Foundation Server is a very large product with lots of features for man-aging the software development lifecycle of software projects and releases. The authors of this book collectively gathered from their past experience since the fi rst release of Team Foundation Server to document some of the tips and tricks that they have learned along the way. The backgrounds of the authors are quite diverse—managing one of the largest Team Foundation Server environments, designing the collaboration pieces for non-.N ET development teams, evangelizing the Visual Studio and Team Foundation Server products, managing releases at a software development company, and a consulting background where customers are helped each week to solve real-world challenges by taking advantage of Team Foundation Server.

WHO THIS BOOK IS FOR

If you have been looking to Team Foundation Server to meet some of your software development team’s challenges for collaboration, then this book is for you. You may have seen the Team Foundation Server product in your M SDN subscription and decided to set up a new environment internally. You may now be wondering how to administer and confi gure the product. You may have also noticed the new, hosted Team Foundation Service offering by M icrosoft and wondered where to get started.

This book is for everyone ranging from the developer using Team Foundation Server for day-to-day development, to the administrator who is ensuring that the environment is tuned to run well and build extensions to the product to meet the needs of their software development team. You may also be preparing for any of the new Application Lifecycle M anagement (ALM ) M icrosoft certifi cation exams for administering or using Team Foundation Server, and you will fi nd many of the exam top-ics covered in this book.

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used for teams as small as one to fi ve team members to teams consisting of tens of thousands. Code samples in the book are presented in C#, but they could also be implemented in other .N ET lan-guages (such as Visual Basic.N ET).

You can fi nd a road map for the book based on your team role later in this “ Introduction” under the section named “ H ow This Book Is Structured.”

WHAT THIS BOOK COVERS

This book covers a complete overview of the Team Foundation Server 2010 product and provides hands-on examples for using the product throughout many of the chapters. This book only covers the latest version of Team Foundation Server 2010 (including Service Pack 1 in some areas) and does not expose the reader to how to use earlier versions of Team Foundation Server.

The book is divided into fi ve main parts, with detailed chapters that will dive into each of the fea-ture areas of Team Foundation Server 2010.

‰ PartI—Getting Started ‰ PartII—Version Control ‰ PartIII—Project M anagement ‰ PartIV—Team Foundation Build ‰ PartV—Administration

HOW THIS BOOK IS STRUCTURED

You may have picked up this book and are wondering where to get started. This book has been written so that you start reading in a particular chapter without needing to understand concepts introduced in previous chapters. Feel free to read the book from cover to cover, or, if you are in a hurry or need to reference a specifi c topic, jump to that particular chapter. The next sections describe where you might get started in the book based on your role and the topics that might be most relevant for you.

Developers

There are plenty of features that are available for developers who are using Team Foundation Server. You might begin by reading Chapter 4, “ Connecting to Team Foundation Server,” to get started with exploring the different options available for connecting to your server.

After that, you can begin your review of the version control features available in Part II of the book:

‰ Chapter5—“ O verview of Version Control”

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xxix INTRODUCTION

‰ Chapter9—“ Branching and M erging”

‰ Chapter10—“ Common Version Control Scenarios”

O nce you have a good grasp of the version control features, you may want to familiarize yourself with the work item tracking and reporting features in Part III of the book:

‰ Chapter11—“ Introducing Work Item Tracking”

‰ Chapter13—“ M anaging Teams and Agile Planning Tools” ‰ Chapter14—“ Reporting and SharePoint Dashboards”

Finally, if you want to automate your build process, you can take advantage of reviewing those fea-tures in Part IV of the book:

‰ Chapter16—“ O verview of Build Automation” ‰ Chapter17—“ Using Team Foundation Build” ‰ Chapter18—“ Customizing the Build Process”

Testers

Team Foundation Server and Visual Studio include a host of new features for testing. You might begin by reading Chapter 4, “ Connecting to Team Foundation Server,” to get started with exploring the different options available for connecting to your server.

After that, you will want to increase your understanding of the work item tracking features (which help track test cases, bugs, tasks, requirements, and so on), as well as the project reporting features in Part III of the book:

If you are a technical tester, and will be automating test cases using the numerous automated test capabilities, then you will want to familiarize yourself with the version control features (which is where you will store the source code for your automated tests) in Part II of the book:

‰ Chapter5—“ O verview of Version Control”

‰ Chapter6—“ Using Team Foundation Version Control” ‰ Chapter9—“ Branching and M erging”

‰ Chapter10—“ Common Version Control Scenarios”

Finally, if you are interested in the testing and environment /lab management features available in Team Foundation Server, you can consult Part V of the book:

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MICROSOFT TEST MANAGER

If you are using M icrosoft Test M anager (available if you have acquired either Visual Studio 2012 Ultimate, Visual Studio 2012 Premium, or Visual Studio 2012 Test Professional), you may want to consult the companion to this book,

Professional Application Lifecycle Management with Visual Studio 2012 (Indianapolis: Wiley, 2012). Several chapters in that book discuss the features available in M icrosoft Test M anager for test case management, executing manual tests, starting exploratory test runs to generate test cases, fi ling rich actionable bugs, creating temporary environments for development and testing use, and auto-mating user interface tests. For more information about this book, visit http:// aka.ms/ALM2012Book.

Project Managers and Business Analysts

As a project manager or business analyst, you will want to ensure that you have insight into the soft-ware release or project, and be able to interact. You may also be interested in what customizations are possible with the process that Team Foundation Server uses for your teams. Project managers might also be interested in the capability to synchronize project data in Team Foundation Server with a M icrosoft O ffi ce Project Server instance. Business analysts may want to create and track requirements, including the traceability options from inception to implementation. Additionally, project managers and business analysts may want to learn how to seek feedback from customers and stakeholders and turn that feedback into new requirements, change requests, or product backlog items.

You might begin by reading Chapter 4, “ Connecting to Team Foundation Server,” to get started with exploring the different options available for connecting to your server. All of the features that would be relevant for project managers and business analysts are discussed in Part III of the book:

‰ Chapter11—“ Introducing Work Item Tracking” ‰ Chapter12—“ Customizing Process Templates”

‰ Chapter13—“ M anaging Teams and Agile Planning Tools” ‰ Chapter14—“ Reporting and SharePoint Dashboards” ‰ Chapter15—“ Project Server Integration”

Project managers and business analysts may also be introduced in the companion to this book,

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xxxi INTRODUCTION

Executive Stakeholders

Executive stakeholders fi nd plenty of use for Team Foundation Server by gathering insight into how software releases and projects are progressing, and often want easily accessible dashboards with the information. The executive that leads the engineering organization may also be interested in planning a Team Foundation Server deployment, including who should administer the server. Additionally with Team Foundation Server 2012 , development teams can request feedback from stakeholders who then can provide rich feedback using the new Feedback Client.

You might begin with the chapters in Part I of the book:

‰ Chapter2—“ Planning a Deployment”

‰ Chapter4—“ Connecting to Team Foundation Server”

After you have a good understanding of the concepts in those chapters, you can then explore the necessary work item tracking and reporting features available in Part III of the book:

Team Foundation Server Administrators

If you fi nd yourself in the position of administering a Team Foundation Server instance, this book provides plenty of great information for performing that role. In Part I of the book, you might begin by reading Chapter 2 , “ Planning a Deployment,” to understand what is required for setting up a Team Foundation Server environment. You can then install a new server by going through Chapter 3, “ Installation and Confi guration.” If you are upgrading from a previous version of Team Foundation Server, you may want to begin by reading through Chapter 25, “ Upgrading from Earlier Versions,” before you get started with the upgrade process.

It is recommended that, as a Team Foundation Server administrator, you understand all of the aspects that end users will take advantage of, including version control, work item tracking, and automated builds. You can read all of the chapters in Parts I through IV for information about those aspects of Team Foundation Server.

Additionally, Part V is dedicated to administrative topics that will be of interest to administrators:

‰ Chapter19—“ Introduction to Team Foundation Server Administration” ‰ Chapter20—“ Scalability and H igh Availability”

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‰ Chapter23—“ M onitoring Server H ealth and Performance” ‰ Chapter24—“ Testing and Lab M anagement”

‰ Chapter25—“ Upgrading from Earlier Versions”

‰ Chapter26—“ Working with Geographically Distributed Teams” ‰ Chapter27—“ Extending Team Foundation Server”

Extensibility Partner

If you are interested in extending the capabilities of Team Foundation Server 2012 , you will fi nd many opportunities and extensibility points throughout this book. You may want to begin by read-ing through Chapter 27, “ Extendread-ing Team Foundation Server.” You will also fi nd extensibility options covered in several other chapters of the book:

‰ Chapter7—“ Ensuring Code Q uality”

‰ Chapter12—“ Customizing Process Templates” ‰ Chapter14—“ Reporting and SharePoint Dashboards” ‰ Chapter18—“ Customizing the Build Process”

WHAT YOU NEED TO USE THIS BOOK

To perform many of the hands-on examples in the book, it will be helpful to have a Team

Foundation Server 2012 environment or Team Foundation Service account that you can use to test out the different features in the product. You do not necessarily need separate hardware, since you can now install Team Foundation Server 2012 on client operating systems such as Windows 8 and Windows 7. Don’t worry about setting up and confi guring a new Team Foundation Server 2012 environment yet, since you will learn about that in Chapters 2 and 3.

Chapter 1 discusses a few options on how to acquire Team Foundation Server, including an entire virtual machine image for demonstration purposes. Chapter 4 also discusses the different tools that you can use to connect to your Team Foundation Server environment that will be needed through-out the book.

The source code for the samples is available for download from the Wrox website at:

http://www.wrox.com/remtitle.cgi?isbn=9781118314098

FURTHER LEARNING

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xxxiii INTRODUCTION

‰ EdBlank enship—www.edsquared.com

‰ M artinW oodw ard—www.woodwardweb.com

‰ G rantH olliday—http://blogs.msdn.com/b/granth

‰ BrianKeller—http://blogs.msdn.com/b/briankel

Additionally, the two main blogs and RSS feeds we would recommend to you following for all of the latest news and updates are listed below as well.

‰ BrianH arry—http://blogs.msdn.com/b/bharry

‰ V isualStudioA L MProductT eam—http://blogs.msdn.com/b/visualstudioalm

CONTINUOUS PRODUCT UPDATES AND RELEASE SCHEDULE

T he one main thing to learn from M icrosoft going for ward for the Visual Studio and Team Foundation Ser ver products is that the product teams will be shipping updates more

frequently — roughly ever y three months. T hese updates will include a roll-up of performance and bug fi xes as well as new features that are completed. For those that will be using the hosted Team Foundation Ser vice, new updates and features are automatically deployed ever y three weeks.

The main thing to remember is that you will want to make sure you are always up to date on both your development machine where Visual Studio products are installed and also your Team Foundation Server environment servers. This book was written for the released version and includes some content and features included in the fi rst quarterly update.

You can fi nd out more information about this new release cadence for Visual Studio and Team Foundation Server at http://aka.ms/TFSShippingCadence.

CONVENTIONS

To help you get the most from the text and keep track of what's happening, we've used a number of conventions throughout the book.

WARNING W arnings hold im portant, not-to -be-forgot ten inform ation that is directly relevant to the surrounding tex t.

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SIDEBAR

Asides to the current discussion are offset like this.

As for styles in the text:

‰ We highlight new terms and important words when we introduce them. ‰ We show keyboard strokes like this: Ctrl+A.

‰ We show fi le names, URLs, and code within the text like so: persistence.properties.

‰ We present code in two different ways:

We use a monofont type with no highlighting for most code examples.

We use bold to emphasize code that is particularly important in the present context or to show changes from a previous code snippet.

SOURCE CODE

As you work through the examples in this book, you may choose either to type in all the code man-ually or to use the source code fi les that accompany the book. All the source code used in this book is available for download at www.wrox.com. Specifi cally for this book, the code download is on the Download Code tab at:

http://www.wrox.com/remtitle.cgi?isbn=9781118314098

You can also search for the book at w w w.wrox.com by ISBN (the ISBN for this book is

978-1-118-31409-8 to fi nd the code). And a complete list of code downloads for all current Wrox books is available at w w w.wrox.com /dynamic/books/download.aspx.

M ost of the code on www.wrox.com is compressed in a .Z IP, .R AR archive, or similar archive format appropriate to the platform. O nce you download the code, just decompress it with an appropriate compression tool.

NOTE Because m any book s have sim ilar titles, you m ay fi nd it easiest to search by ISBN ; this book ’s ISBN is 978 -1-118 -314 09-8.

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xxxv INTRODUCTION

ERRATA

We make every effort to ensure that there are no errors in the text or in the code. H owever, no one is perfect, and mistakes do occur. If you fi nd an error in one of our books, like a spelling mistake or faulty piece of code, we would be very grateful for your feedback. By sending in errata, you may save another reader hours of frustration, and at the same time, you will be helping us provide even higher quality information.

To fi nd the errata page for this book, go to

http://www.wrox.com/remtitle.cgi?isbn=9781118314098

And click the Errata link. O n this page, you can view all errata that has been submitted for this book and posted by Wrox editors.

If you don’t spot “ your” error on the Book Errata page, go to www.wrox.com/contact

/techsupport.shtml and complete the form there to send us the error you have found. We’ll check the information and, if appropriate, post a message to the book’s errata page and fi x the problem in subsequent editions of the book.

P2P.WROX.COM

For author and peer discussion, join the P2P forums at http://p2p.wrox.com. The forums are a Web-based system for you to post messages relating to Wrox books and related technologies, and interact with other readers and technology users. The forums offer a subscription feature to e-mail you topics of interest of your choosing when new posts are made to the forums. Wrox authors, edi-tors, other industry experts, and your fellow readers are present on these forums.

At http://p2p.wrox.com, you will fi nd a number of different forums that will help you, not only as you read this book, but also as you develop your own applications. To join the forums, just follow these steps:

1.

Go to http://p2p.wrox.com and click the Register link.

2.

Read the terms of use and click Agree.

3.

Complete the required information to join, as well as any optional information you wish to provide, and click Submit.

4.

You will receive an e-mail with information describing how to verify your account and com-plete the joining process.

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O nce you join, you can post new messages and respond to messages other users post. You can read messages at any time on the Web. If you would like to have new messages from a par ticular forum e-mailed to you, click the Subscribe to this Forum icon by the forum name in the forum listing.

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PART I

Getting Started

⊲

CHAPTER 1:

Introducing Team Foundation Server 2012

⊲

CHAPTER 2:

Planning a Deployment

⊲

CHAPTER 3:

Installation and Conﬁ guration

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1

Introducing Team Foundation

Server 2012

WHAT’S IN THIS CHAPTER?

‰ Getting to know Team Foundation Server 2012

‰ Understanding what’s new in Team Foundation Server 2012

‰ Acquiring Team Foundation Server 2012

This chapter introduces you to M icrosoft Visual Studio Team Foundation Server 2012. H ere you will learn what it is for, the key concepts needed when using it, and how to acquire it.

For those users already familiar with Team Foundation Server, the discussion in this chapter highlights areas that are new or have changed substantially. H owever, because understanding the legacy of a technology is always helpful, this chapter also includes some of the history of the Team Foundation Server product, which will help explain how it became what it is today.

This chapter also discusses the improved release model, including the ability to have M icrosoft manage hosting, frequent upgrades, and backups by leveraging the Team Foundation Service. Later chapters will go into more depth with an examination of the architecture of the Team Foundation Server product.

WHAT IS TEAM FOUNDATION SERVER?

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Team Foundation Server provides the core collaboration functionality for your software development teams in a very tightly integrated product. The functionality provided by Team Foundation Server includes the following:

‰ Project management

‰ Work item tracking (WIT)

‰ Version control

‰ Test case management

‰ Build automation

‰ Reporting

‰ Lab and environment management

‰ Feedback management

Each of these topics is explored extensively in this book.

Team Foundation Server is a separate server product designed specifi cally for software engineering teams with developers, testers, architects, project managers, business analysts, and anyone else con-tributing to software development releases and projects. Logically, Team Foundation Server is made up of the following two tiers, which can be physically deployed across one or many machines:

1.

Application Tier—The applicationtier primarily consists of a set of web services with which the client machines communicate by using a highly optimized, web service-based protocol. It also includes a rich web access site to interact with a server without having to install a client such as Visual Studio.

2.

Data Tier—The datatier is made up of a SQ L Server database containing the database logic of the Team Foundation Server application, along with the data for your Team Foundation Server instance. The data stored in the database is used by Team Foundation Server’s report-ing functionality. All the data stored in Team Foundation Server is stored in this SQ L Server database, thus making it easy to back up.

Team Foundation Server was designed with extensibility in mind. It can integrate with a compre-hensive .N ET Application Programming Interface (API). It also has a set of events that allow it to integrate with outside tools as fi rst-class citizens. The same .N ET programming model and event system is used by M icrosoft to construct Team Foundation Server, as well as the client integrations into Visual Studio.

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What’s New in Team Foundation Server 2012

_x

5

NOTE Jason Z ander, Corporate V ice President for V isual Studio, m ak es this par-ticular point w ell in a blog post originally about Team Foundation Server 2010. You can fi nd the blog post at http://aka.ms/IntegratedALMSolution.

W hen you compare enterprise ALM products cu rrently on the market, you will discover that Team Fou ndation Ser ver was designed to be easily customized and ex tended. Team Fou ndation Ser ver ensu res that developers using any development platform can par ticipate and easily use Tea m Fou nd at ion Ser ver, includ ing Visu a l St ud io, Eclipse-based development , Xcode, a nd ma ny more.

WHAT’S NEW IN TEAM FOUNDATION SERVER 2012

If you have used legacy versions of Team Foundation Server, you may be curious about what is new in the latest release. As this book demonstrates, it is a big release with considerable new function-ality and improvements across the board. While many of these features are explained throughout this book, if you have used a previous version of Team Foundation Server, the features described in the following sections will be new to you. Some of the client-side topics are covered in more detail in the companion book to this volume, ProfessionalA pplicationL ifecycleM anagem entw ithVisualStudio 2012.

Version Control

O ne goal for this release was to dramatically improve the experience for developers and other team members who use the version control repository in Team Foundation Server. M any small features and improvements should be noticeable in reducing the friction of working with Team Foundation Server. For example, many of the algorithms used in the merge process have been improved so that you can trust the auto-merge process more, and fewer false positives show up as merge confl icts.

Another notable change for developers who have been using Visual Studio for a long time is the replacement for the Compare/Diff tool that has been around for a while. It now takes advantage of the new code editor in Visual Studio so that you can get IntelliSense, syntax coloring, etc., within the com-pare tool. There are also several different views you can use based on your preferences for reviewing the differences.

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Some side benefi ts to the new local workspaces model include remarkable improvements in being able to work offl ine. Local workspaces and how this paradigm shift changes are both covered in detail in Chapters 5 and 6.

To date, the Team Foundation Server product team also introduced a fully supported tool for Git integration called Git-tf.exe. It allows a developer to create a local Git repository that is a clone of a central Team Foundation Server version control repository. This tool allows the team to work locally in that Git repository and then commit changes back up to the Team Foundation Server repository when they are ready. Because the command-line tool was implemented in Java, it can be used on several platforms. For example, an iO S developer can now use the native Git integration in the Xcode IDE on M ac O S and still be able to contribute to a Team Foundation Server repository as well, where other team members may be working within their organization.

Code Reviews

Team Foundation Server 2012 also introduces a built-in set of experiences for requesting, respond-ing, and managing code reviews. This set uses the powerful work item tracking experiences behind the scenes as well as some specialized user experiences to help you discuss changes. O pening a set of changes from a code review uses the new diff experience, as mentioned in the previous section.

You can also make comments at a code review, fi le, or specifi c set of lines of code-level, including the ability to have thread discussions. After you have fi nished completing a review, you can approve, send back with comments, or reject a code review.

Managing Personal Work

N ew experiences are also available in Visual Studio 2012 , when connected to Team Foundation Server 2012 , for managing your personal context and work while developing. These new experi-ences start from the “ M y Work” pane in Team Explorer. Developers can indicate which task, bug, or work item they are working on and then check-in those changes together.

If developers are not fi nished with their work or are called to do something else, they can also sus-pend their work, which creates a shelveset. It exceeds the shelveset concept in previous versions of Team Foundation Ser ver because it also stores the impor tant contex t information about where the work was suspended. Developers can later “resume” their work and it will load the solution and projects, open windows, breakpoints, etc., back as they were when the work was suspended.

Web Access

Team Web Access has been completely redesigned in Team Foundation Server 2012 to provide an even better experience for those without any of the traditional clients available. It is friendly to modern browsers, including mobile browsers, and works well with several form factors.

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Acquisition Options

_x

7

Project Management

In Service Pack 1 of Team Foundation Server 2010 and an associated feature pack in that release, the product team introduced support for bidirectional synchronization between project management work items in Team Foundation Server and tasks in Project Server. This synchronization is included in the Team Foundation Server 2012 release. You can learn more about Project Server integration in Chapter 15.

Agile and Scrum Product Management

Additional new experiences added to Team Web Access are agile project management and product planning. The new Agile Planning tools are specifi cally designed for users practicing principles from Scrum, but can actually be benefi cial for those using any process.

The primary tools introduced in this release are Product Backlog planning; Sprint /Iteration planning, including managing team capacity; live velocity and sprint burndown reports; and a new task board that can be useful for daily Scrums or status meetings. Each of these tools is team-ori-ented so that different teams can manage their own backlogs and progress.

O ne of the nice things introduced with these tools is the ability to track start and end dates on Iteration paths. These dates are then used around Team Foundation Server to provide a richer experience.

Stakeholder Feedback

Teams and product owners can now request rich feedback from stakeholders, business users, and cus-tomers from working editions of their applications and software. Those stakeholders will receive an e-mail with a link to connect them automatically to Team Foundation Server and immediately start providing feedback using a new lightweight client appropriately named the M icrosoft Feedback Client.

Build

This release also includes several improvements to the built-in build system, including the ability to batch your gated check-ins. This can be useful if you receive numerous check-ins during the day that all need to be validated quickly. Additionally, the new Team Explorer includes some user experience improvements, including marking builds as personal or team favorites, and the ability to fi lter build defi nitions if your team project contains a lot of them.

Development teams that use third-party testing frameworks outside of MSTest will be happy to know that those teams can now include those tests in test runs during the automated build process in Team Foundation Server 2012.

ACQUISITION OPTIONS

M icrosoft also greatly improved how you may acquire Team Foundation Server. Several options are available to you, as discussed in the following sections.

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exceptions, each user that connects to the server should have a Client Access License (CAL) for Team Foundation Server.

NOTE For m ore inform ation about those potential ex ceptions, or questions about w hat you w ill need to purchase, you can seek help from a M icrosof t Partner w ith the A L M Com petency, your local M icrosof t D eveloper Tools Specialist, or reference the End-User L icense A greem ent (EUL A ). A licensing w hite paper dedicated to V isual Studio, M SD N , and Team Foundation Server is also available here: http://aka.ms/VisualStudioLicensing.

Team Foundation Service

By far, the easiest way to get started with adopting Team Foundation Server is through a new hosted option available directly from M icrosoft called the Team Foundation Service. It shares a majority of the same code base as the same Team Foundation Server product used on-premises but modifi ed to be hosted from Windows Azure for multiple tenants. It is available at http://tfs.visualstudio.com.

The best part of using the Team Foundation Service is that your team need not worry about backups, high availability, upgrades, or other potential time-consuming administration and maintenance tasks. Another nice thing is that Team Foundation Service customers, before on-premises customers, will receive frequent updates that even include new features.

NOTE Brian H arry announced that the internal product team s im proved their engi-neering process so w ell over the past tw o to three years that they are able to quick ly provide m ore frequent updates. Starting w ith Team Foundation Server 2012, the product team is planning to provide updates that include the typical perform ance and bug fi x es but also brand new features. T he frequency is still to be determ ined, but the fi rst on-prem ises update w ill be available before the end of calendar year 2012. Team Foundation Service custom ers w ill see updates m ade m ore frequently than the on -prem ises edition. Brian m entioned that his team s are able to deploy hot-fi x es daily, but plans to provide full-featured updates every three w eek s, w hich lines up w ith the intern al sprint schedule. You can learn m ore about this topic from Brian H arry’s blog post at http://aka.ms/TFSReleaseCadence. O ne thing to tak e aw ay from this discussion is to m ak e sure that your team alw ays uses the latest update of Team Foundation Server if you choose to install it on -prem ises.