Professional Application Lifecycle Management with Visual Studio 2012

Chapter 1

Introduction to Application Lifecycle Management with Visual Studio 2012

What's In This Chapter?

• Defining application lifecycle management
• Learning about the Visual Studio 2012 product family
• Understanding the structure of this book

In June of 1999, Microsoft started to re-evaluate how Visual Studio was being used as part of the software development process. Microsoft was continuing to serve the needs of an individual programmer through the highly productive “code-focused rapid-application-development” features of Visual Studio, but wasn't doing much to help programmers work together as a team. And what about software architects——how should they be working with the programming team? And testers? Project managers?

Many teams had begun to set up their own solutions using a mixture of third-party, in-house, and vendor-provided tools to address such challenges as version control, bug tracking, and team communications. But this mishmash of tools can be tricky to set up and maintain, and even more difficult to integrate. Microsoft sought to address this challenge by providing an integrated set of tools designed to address the needs of the entire software development team. Thus, Visual Studio Team System was born, and was first released with the Visual Studio 2005 product line.

At the heart of Team System, Team Foundation Server was created to provide a hub for all members of the development team to collaborate. Team Foundation Server is uniquely positioned from its predecessors ...