TFS 2012 and TFS Preview

Microsoft has been trying to play catch up in the recent years with some of their process tools. By this I mean scrum and continuous delivery. With the release of TFS a few years ago, they provided a decent tool to allow you to get some nice integration out of the box with your code as well as a half baked dashboard to do some work item based task management. But it was clunky, slow and hooking TFS up to some sort of continuous integration system was a major pain in the ass.

Welcome TFS 2012 and TFS Preview. Finally, Microsoft has started to get it right in my book. If you have not yet checked out TFS Preview I suggest you do. Basically they are offering a cloud hosted solution of TFS 2012 that allows you to get a full Scrum solution on top of your TFS work items with a real backlog and real task board; source control browser to view, compare and manage your source code similar to a Github like interface; and a build management area to view your builds in real time.

By hosting your TFS repository on Microsofts solution you are getting very tight integration in their infrastructure. Part of this is the direct integration with Azure Services. Now with the click of a button, you can enable direct deployment to an Azure instance right from your TFS build. This is extremely cool.

So with TFS Preview, I have been able to have a full cloud strategy that includes source control, scrum process application and continuous delivery solution to push checked in changes out to Azure Services.

Looking forward to more of what Microsoft has to offer.