What is Team Foundation Server?

There are few source control tools available for professional developers like VSS, SVN and MS TFS. 

Team Foundation Server is a change management system that provides integrated source control, issue tracking and process management for development teams.

Visual Studio TFS?

Team Foundation Server enhance the communication among team members by ensuring that no information or work is lost when a team member hand over his task to team. 

Project of the team is stored in the MS TFS and every team member has its own credentials to connect to TFS for accessing the project. TFS provides a central location to team project and each team member coordinate his work at this location. There are two major components in Visual Studio TFS :-

TFS Source Control

TFS source control allow the team to manage all source files for a project. We can also add non-source files such as important project documents, project plans etc to TFS.

Team Explorer

All members of a team work together on the team project by using Team Explorer in Visual Studio. Team Explorer connects to the TFS and displays team projects from the server. By using Team Explorer, every team member can get updated work items, projects documents and task to do. 

Team Foundation Server Tutorial

Team Explorer contains following features :-

My Work
This is a new feature of Team Explorer that allows you to suspend and resume work quickly and easily. This feature is only available in Premium or Ultimate. 

Pending Changes
You can open the Pending Changes window to view all pending changes for your Team Foundation Server work-space. For each pending change, you can view the associated work items, the associated check-in notes, and any policy warnings that are caused by this check-in. You can also compare the pending change with another version of the file.

Source Control Explorer
You can browse team projects and workspaces to identify what is under Team Foundation version control. You can determine whether items are copied to your local computer’s Eclipse workspace. You can view all pending changes. For each version-controlled item, you can view properties and history that is associated with that item.

Work Items
All working items are logged on TFS with all changes. Anyone can review the complete history of activity on a work item at any time. The working item history can be exported into Microsoft.

Builds
TFS Build enables the team to create and manage product builds regularly. TFS Build also provides build reports on the status and quality of each build.

Reports
Reports related to track status and information (like as work item changes, check-ins and status of product builds etc.) about the project are stored in a database on the MS TFS.

Documents
You can share documents and files that you want to make available to all team members by uploading them to the project portal for your team project. 

Visual Studio Tools for ALM

There are many tools involved, the core for all the ALM (Application Life Cycle Management) phases is the Team Foundation Server. The latest version of the Team Foundation Server is MS TFS 2013.

Tools supporting Application Lifecycle Managemen with MS TFS

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