Professional Team Foundation Server 2012

Introduction

Over the past decade, Microsoft 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. However, 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, Microsoft introduced a new server product named Team Foundation Server to complement its development products. Now in its fourth release, Team Foundation Server 2012 has grown with all of the investment from the past decade and fits nicely in the Visual Studio application lifecycle management (ALM) 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 find out, Team Foundation Server is a very large product with lots of features for managing the software development lifecycle of software projects and releases. The authors of this book collectively gathered from their past experience since the first release of Team Foundation Server to document some of the tips and tricks that they have learned along ...