Team Development with Visual Studio Team Foundation Server

J.D. Meier, Jason Taylor, Prashant Bansode, Alex Mackman, and Kevin Jones
Microsoft Corporation

September 2007

Microsoft® Visual Studio® Team System 2008 Team Foundation Server introduces a number of new features and capabilities. The primary changes have been:

• Administration, Operations & Setup. Installation has been simplified to reduce setup time and improved to support more deployment scenarios.
• Build. Build includes Continuous Integration, scheduled builds, and build queuing solutions out of the box. Build management and extensibility has been simplified with more functionality available from the UI.
• Version Control. Version control includes much better support for offline work and has improved performance.
• Work Item Tracking. Work item tracking includes an improved query builder and improved support for work item attachments.

These product changes are listed and briefly described below, followed by a table explaining how the changes will impact the guidance in this guide. Use this chapter to aid in your Microsoft Visual Studio Team Foundation Server upgrade planning.

Administration, Operations & Setup

• Simplified installation – Installation is made easier and quicker compared to Visual Studio 2005 TFS. Improvements include the elimination of the separate data-tier installation as well as the elimination of the domain account requirement. Team Foundation Server 2008 supports built-in machine accounts (such as Network Service) wherever possible.
• Support for SharePoint 2007 – Adds support for SharePoint 2007 and Windows SharePoint Services 3.0. Team Foundation Server 2008 will support SharePoint on a separate server from the Team Foundation Application Tier Server.
• Support for Windows Server 2008 – Supports the next version of Microsoft Windows Server™; for example Microsoft Windows Server 2008 and Internet Information Services (IIS) 7.0.
• Support for X.509 Client Certificates – Supports the use of X.509 client certificates to improve authentication security.
• Large group synchronization – Improves performance and robustness and will be able to support large numbers of users — approximately 2200 or more users in a single instance of TFS.
• Support for SQL named instances – Allows sharing of a SQL Server between multiple TFS instances, or with other applications. This allows different instances of TFS to use the same installation of SQL Server 2005.
• Support for non-default ports – Improves configurability to support alternate Web sites and ports. 

Build

• Continuous Integration builds – Supports the creation of build triggers that allows you to configure exactly when Continuous Integration builds should be started. For example, you can set a trigger so that every check-in starts a build, or you can set up a rolling build so that builds will start no more often than every X minutes.
• Support for build queuing – Supports build queuing and queue management. This is especially useful for Continuous Integration as multiple check-ins may queue up multiple builds.
• Scheduled builds – Supports scheduled builds, which can be configured to start at specified times based on your organization’s requirements.
• Drop management – Supports drop management, which gives you the ability to set policies for when builds should be automatically deleted.
• Specify build properties – Allows you to specify what source and versions of source should be built along with other build properties for a build type. There are many more exposed properties for customizing a build. Additionally, MSBuild command-line parameters can be passed when queuing builds.
• Extensibility of build targets – Improves extensibility of the build targets. For example, you now have the ability to easily execute targets before and after each Visual Studio solution or project is built.
• Build management – Allows you to stop and delete builds from within Visual Studio.
• Build configuration – Simplifies the ability to specify what tests get run as part of a build.
• Build project file location flexibility – Provides the ability to store the MSBuild project file (and its associated rsp file) anywhere in the version control hierarchy instead of forcing the use of the TeamBuildTypes folder.
• Support for GUI tests – Allows running graphical user interface (GUI) tests as part of the build.
• Check-in Policy – Supports a new check-in policy, which prevents users from checking-in code when a Continuous Integration build is broken.
• Managing build server – Improves ability to manage multiple build machines.
• Workspace mapping – Build definition can be associated with a “real” workspace, meaning code from multiple team projects can be retrieved, client mappings can be specified, etc. Working folder mappings will be managed in the GUI instead of in workspacemapping.xml

Version Control

• Annotate – Supports an annotation feature that allows your developers to inspect a source code file and see line-by-line-level detail about who last changed each section of code.
• Folder Diff – Supports comparing of folders where the contents of the folder are recursively compared in order to identify files that differ. Folder Diff can compare local folders to local folders, local folders to server folders, and server folders to server folders.
• Destroy – Supports the Destroy feature with the ability to remove files and folders from the version control system. The destroyed files and folders cannot be recovered after they have been destroyed.
• Get Latest On Checkout – Includes an option for downloading the latest version of the file while checking it out.
• Workspace wild card mappings – Allows mapping of a folder or file under a cloaked folder and wildcard mappings so that you can map all files in a folder without mapping sub folders. 
• Performance improvements – A variety of version control performance enhancements have been made, improving all aspects of version-control performance. Although the gains for smaller servers/projects (< 10,000 files) will be modest, the gains for larger projects (particularly where the file count approaches hundreds of thousands) will be substantial.
• Team Foundation Server 2008 command line Help – Supports the ability to get command line Help for the tf tool. You get the Help by running "tf help" and obtain Help for individual commands by running "tf command /help".
• Offline improvements – Improves the experience of going offline and has integrated the tfpt online capability into the Visual Studio Integrated Development Environment (IDE) for going back online.  
• Check-in override information captured – Supports adding check-in policy overrides to the warehouse.

Work Item Tracking

• Attachments improvements – Supports drag-and-drop support for adding an attachment and allows multi-select for attaching files.
• Query Builder – Query Builder usability has improved in the following ways:
• • Drop-down filtering is now based on the current project
  • Improved MRU lists
  • Column drag-and-drop
  • SHIFT + click mouse-based multi-column sorting

Compatibility Issues with Visual Studio 2005 Team System

The Visual Studio 2008 Team Foundation Server client is able to work with a Visual Studio 2005 Team Foundation Server and a Visual Studio 2005 client is able to work with a Visual Studio 2008 Team Foundation Server, except for the following compatibility issues.

• Visual Studio add-ins – Client-side Visual Studio add-ins will need to be recompiled (or have their policy changed) because the Team Foundation Server Object Model (TFSOM) assembly versions will change and add-ins will need to bind to the new assemblies. 
• Team builds – Most build operations ­― such as listing build definitions, starting and stopping builds and examining build reports will work with the combination of Visual Studio 2005 TFS and Visual Studio 2008 clients and server. The following are the known issues:
• 1. A Visual Studio 2008 Team Foundation Server instance will only work with a Visual Studio 2008 Team Foundation Server build server.
  2. For a Visual Studio 2005 client to start a build on an Visual Studio 2008 Team Foundation Server instance, the build definition needs to be stored at $/<TeamProject>/TeamBuildTypes/<name>. 
  3. Changes made to properties in the tfsbuild.proj file that are in the database in Team Foundation Server 2008 will not be updated in the database and will no longer be in sync.
  4. When working with the Continuous Integration feature in Team Foundation Server 2008, the Visual Studio 2005 client will be able to start a build, but it will not be able to queue a build, see the list of builds in the queue, see the list of build agents, etc.
  5. A new build type cannot be created on a Visual Studio 2005 TFS server, using a Visual Studio 2008 Team Foundation Server client.
  6. Parameters in the dialog for starting a build on Visual Studio 2005 Team Foundation Server cannot be changed when using a Visual Studio 2008 Team Foundation Server client.

Impact on the Guidance

Additional Resources

• For more information on Visual Studio 2008 Team Foundation Server see, “An Overview of Microsoft Visual Studio Code Name "Orcas" White Paper” at http://go.microsoft.com/?linkid=6625887