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 2010 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.
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 third release, Team
Foundation Server 2010 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 release.
As you will fi nd out, Team Foundation Server 2010 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.