Professional Team Foundation Server 2013

Introduction

Over the past decade, Microsoft has been creating development tools designed for the ever-growing engineering teams of software developers, testers, architects, project managers, designers, and database administrators. In the Visual Studio 2013 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 fifth release, Team Foundation Server 2013 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.

In September 2011, Microsoft announced the availability of Team Foundation Service Preview. This service started by providing the base functionality of Team Foundation Server but built on the Microsoft Azure cloud platform. Over the next two and a half years, the teams at Microsoft worked to expand the feature set of the service from basic version control, work item tracking, ...