Team Foundation Server In Brief Articles, samples and tutorials

Introduction

Team Foundation Server (TFS) is a Microsoft offering for source control, data collection, reporting, and project tracking, and is intended for collaborative software development projects. It is available either as stand-alone software or as the server side back end platform for Visual Studio Team System (VSTS).

Some Important features of TFS

1. Team Foundation Server (TFS) works in three-tier architecture: the client tier, the application tier and the data tier.
2. The web services are used by applications like Visual Studio Team System (VSTS) to use TFS as data storage back end or dedicated TFS management applications like the included Team Foundation Client (TFC).
3. The client tier: used for creating and managing projects and accessing the items that are stored and managed for a project.
4. The application layer: consists of the web services. It also includes a web portal and a document repository facilitated by Windows SharePoint Services.
5. The data layer: essentially a SQL Server 2005 Standard Edition installation provides the persistent data storage services for the document repository.
6. The data tier and application tier can exist on different physical or virtual servers as well, provided they are running Windows Server 2003 or better.
7. Team Project Portal – This is web portal which acts as the central point of communication for projects managed by TFS.
8. The data tier is not exposed to the client tier, only the application tier is.
9. Team Foundation Server provides a source control repository, called Team Foundation Version Control (TFVC).
10. Reporting is another major component of Team Foundation Server.
11. The reports are built using SQL Server Reporting Services, and can be exported in several different formats, including Excel, XML, PDF, and TIFF.
12. TFS uses its logging framework for automated data collection as well.
13. TFS includes a warehouse adapter in the data tier, which caches data from the underlying normalized database in a form suitable for analytics.
14. SQL Server Analysis Services are then used to analyze this data, and reports created.
15. TFS creates a SharePoint site for the project, which can be used to track the progress of the project as well as to explore the work items and source controlled documents in the project.
16. As a communication medium, the users associated with each other can use it to communicate amongst each other.
17. The Linking service allows loosely coupled relationships to be created between items.
18. The Security service allows creation of security groups from users, to which access rights are then assigned. The classification service allows definition of policies to automatically classify items based on a multitude of criteria.
19. The Eventing service allows any component to raise an event and a notification action assigned to the event.
20. Team Build is a build server included with Team Foundation Server that can be installed on almost any machine that can support Visual Studio.

Team Foundation Server In Brief

Introduction

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