Release of Patterns & Practices "Team Development with Team Foundation Server" Guide

We just released the final version of the “Team Development with Team Foundation Server” Guide. This guide has been in beta for the last couple of months. This guide shows you how to get the most out of Team Foundation Server to help improve the effectiveness of your team-based software development. Whether you are already using Team Foundation Server or adopting from scratch, you’ll find guidance and insights you can tailor for your specific scenarios. It's a collaborative effort between patterns & practices, Team System team members, VSTS Rangers and industry experts.

Part I, “Fundamentals,” gives you a quick overview of team development with Team Foundation Server. You’ll see the big picture in terms of your software development environment, including the development and test environment. You’ll also learn the basic architecture of Team Foundation Server.

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Part II, “Source Control,” shows you how to structure your source code and manage dependencies. It also shows you how to determine a branching and merging strategy if you need isolation for your development efforts.

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Part III, “Builds,” shows you how to set up team builds, how to produce continuous integration builds for your development team, and how to drop scheduled builds to your test team. It also discusses common problems and how to work around them.

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Part IV, “Large Project Considerations,” show you additional considerations you need to deal with when working with large projects.

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Part V, “Project Management,” shows you how to use Team Foundation Server work items, areas and iterations to streamline your development process regardless of what project management approach you use.

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Part VI, “Process Templates,” shows you how to get the most out of the process templates and process guidance that is supplied with Team Foundation Server out of the box. It also shows how you can customize the process templates, and make modifications to work items and workflow to map to the software engineering process your team is already using.

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Part VII, “Reporting,” shows you how all of the other Team Foundation Server components integrate their data store into a common reporting mechanism. You’ll learn how to use the default reports as well as how to build your own custom reports.

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Part VIII, “Setting Up and Maintaining the Team Environment,” removes the mystery from Team Foundation Server deployment. You’ll learn how to choose between a single server and multiple server deployment. You’ll also learn how to support remote development teams and how to maximize Team Foundation Server performance.

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Part IX, “Visual Studio 2008 Team Foundation Server”, shows the changes that are coming in the next version of Team Foundation Server. You’ll learn what new features are planned as well as what features are going to be significantly improved. Some of the changes impact the guidance we give elsewhere in this guide, so use this section to improve your Team Foundation Server upgrade planning.

This guide is available at: https://www.codeplex.com/TFSGuide. We will be making this available at MSDN as well as in the p&p blue book form.

 

Cheers

 

Jon