Those of you who have already experienced the Beta Version may have noticed that there is a new hosted, cloud-based Application Lifecycle Management provider on the block – and it’s Microsoft’s!
Visual Studio is surprisingly good and can be accessed with a go-live license (http://tfspreview.com). While, as with all new services it does have its flaky moments, the product team is fast to fix them and we have a number of customers that are moving to this service. The DivDev (Developer Division at Microsoft) has already moved and their 18tb+ instance is often the root cause of the “flaky moments”. 
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Webcast: Connecting to Team Foundation Service from Visual Studio 2010
In order to connect to the Team Foundation Service Preview environments, you will need a couple of Software Downloads (TIP: Martin Woodward has a fantastic post on how to do so). These software updates will get you connected with Visual Studio 2010, but there are other types of access you will need.
Figure: Connecting over https for added security
Well, in Visual Studio 11 the onus is on a cross platform, in achieving this many of the features have been moved to the web access, which has also been severely rewritten.
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Webcast: Connecting to Team Foundation Service from a browser
Once you have connected to your Team Foundation Service instance you can start to have a look around the UI. There are a lot of new capabilities, not least of which is the ability to log in via Live Id. However if you have international users, or users that move around the world you will need to be a little careful as it is not currently possible for a user to change the region associated with their Windows Live ID for billing. Team Foundation Service has mitigated this by not using Live Billing, but remember that you can only log in with a single Live Id at a time.
Figure: Live Id is both a blessing and a curse
The product team has pulled out all of the stops, and while the preview still has some rough edges they are making it an awesome experience for users and administrators alike.
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Webcast: A walk around the new UI
If you look closely you will see that it has borrowed heavily from the Metro theme which makes it clean and crisp. The interface is responsive (mostly) and is a joy to use. I love the new live burn down and reporting that is available right there is the UI. When you update a work item you can see the burn down update dynamically.
Figure: The addition of dates on Iterations is welcome
There are many new features that will make you drool – my highlights are:
- Web UI that works on more than IE
- Dates on Iterations
- Built in support for Team’s
Figure: Don’t forget the second page when creating a Team
Some of my favorite bits:
- Project & Team profiles with images and identity
- Default areas and Iterations for teams
- Support for configuring Alerts for others and teams
- The ability to see effective permissions
- Options to see where those effective permissions came from
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