Team Foundation Server - Details

Get a unified view across your project with Team Explorer

Team Explorer is available standalone or as a integrated component of the Visual Studio IDE and provides team members with access to a common repository for version control, work item tracking, project documents, process guidance, build and reporting in single view.

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Manage change to project artifacts with advanced Team Foundation Version Control

Microsoft Visual Studio 2005 Team Foundation Server enables you and your team to develop with the peace of mind that comes with knowing that a history of every change to your source code and project artifacts is captured. In addition to change control, Team Foundation Server provides sophisticated branching and merging capabilities enabling you to support even the most complex software configuration management architectures. A feature called shelving lets you store work-in-progress that is checked out on the server without affecting the existing code in the live tree and makes it available to your peers for code reviews and buddy tests.

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Communicate and manage work across the team with Team Foundation Work Item Tracking

Track bugs, tasks, requirements, and scenarios right out of the box; easy customization allows you to track anything your team works on. Integration with Visual Studio development and testing features enables you to document your work with little extra effort. Work-item tracking is deeply integrated with version control and reporting to deliver comprehensive traceability and business intelligence capabilities. Work items are automatically tracked in reports, can be scheduled using Microsoft Project, and lists of them can be exported to Microsoft Excel for more analysis. You can easily use work items to prioritize work, make notes about dependencies, and to notify other teammates when a fix is in place or requires additional action.

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Collaborate using the Team Portal

The team portal is automatically created when a new team project is set up in Team Foundation Server. Based on Windows SharePoint Services, it provides all the collaboration features found in SharePoint, in addition to integrated process guidance and reporting.

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Define your development process using Team Foundation Process Templates

Process templates take process guidance out of books and put it into the tools you use every day. Leverage industry-recognized best practices like MSF and partner-provided process templates such as Scrum. Gain consistency by starting each project based on proven, successful blueprint and collaborate using a Web-based team portal. Process templates capture details about a team project, such as how to complete work item fields, reporting templates and descriptions of queries. Process guidance also provides details about the process steps on a team project, such as role definitions and activities to complete.

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Integrate your team’s work together regularly using Team Foundation Build

Releasing regular builds is essential to a successful software project. Team Foundation Build is a turnkey build lab solution that pulls together your team’s work to create documented and verified builds of your project. With Team Foundation Build you can synchronize the sources, compile the application, run associated unit tests, perform code analysis, release builds on a file server, and publish build reports. Build result data propagates to the warehouse for historical reporting. Improve quality every day by regularly integrating your team's work together.

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Make real-time decisions based on performance and quality metrics with reporting and business intelligence

Reporting and business intelligence provides visibility into project activity to make informed decisions based on real-time data. Individual work is aggregated into a SQL Server data warehouse to provide sophisticated progress, velocity, and trending reports that offer a holistic view of your project. These reports summarize the metrics from work items, source control, test results, and builds. For example, the reports can tell you if your team is progressing against plan or the quality indicators of an application.

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Support distributed and outsourced development teams

Team Foundation Version Control supports Web-based protocols (HTTP and HTTPS). Visual Studio Team Foundation Server includes a caching proxy, Team Foundation Server Proxy, which caches file content at the remote location, thereby providing a much better user experience to the remote development team. Furthermore, Team Foundation Version Control is optimized for high-latency and low-bandwidth scenarios. Often times the teams on either side of the geographical boundary are on different corporate domains. Visual Studio Team Foundation Server supports the scenario where Team Foundation Server Proxy and Team Foundation Server each reside on different Windows domains.