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OVER THE PAST DECADE, Microsoft has been creating development tools that have been designed for
the ever-growing engineering teams of software developers, testers, architects, project managers,
designers, and database administrators. In the Visual Studio 2012 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 fourth release, Team
Foundation Server 2012 has grown with all of the investment from the past decade and fi ts 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.
As you will fi nd out, Team Foundation Server is a very large product with lots of features for managing
the software development lifecycle of software projects and releases. The authors of this book
collectively gathered from their past experience since the fi rst release of Team Foundation Server
to document some of the tips and tricks that they have learned along the way. The backgrounds of
the authors are quite diverse—managing one of the largest Team Foundation Server environments,
designing the collaboration pieces for non-.NET development teams, evangelizing the Visual Studio
and Team Foundation Server products, managing releases at a software development company, and
a consulting background where customers are helped each week to solve real-world challenges by
taking advantage of Team Foundation Server. |