Using Team Foundation to Manage Development Processes

If you are a software developer who uses Visual Studio 2010 Professional and your team is using Visual Studio Team Foundation Server 2010, you have access to features that can help you and your team improve quality and performance, improve predictability of the development process, and reduce the overall cost of team development.

Note

If you use Visual Studio 2010 Ultimate or Visual Studio 2010 Premium you have an even more extensive set of features. For more information about which features are available in the different editions of Visual Studio 2010, see Application Lifecycle Management Features in Visual Studio 2010.

Get Started

To access the Team Foundation features, you will need to connect to your team project. For more information see:

Connect to and Access Team Projects in Team Foundation Server

Track your work

You can quickly find your work items in Team Explorer and you can create links among bugs and other work items that show relationships between them. For more information see:

Tracking Bugs, Tasks, and Other Work Items

Finding Bugs, Tasks, and Other Work Items

Setting Alerts

Maintain version-controlled files

Team Explorer provides version control so that you can check code and other version-controlled files in and out and revert to earlier versions. For more information see:

Using Version Control

Get the Source for Your Team Project

Branching and Merging

Define and manage builds

Whether your organization is a small startup with simple needs or a large and complex enterprise, you can design a build system topology to meet your needs. As your code base expands and your team grows, you can quickly and easily scale your build system out one build machine at a time. For more information, see:

Building the Application

Define a Gated Check-In Build Process to Validate Changes

Understanding Team Foundation Build Configuration Files

Use the Builds Check-In Policy to Minimize Code Churn after Breaks to Continuous Builds

Protect your nightly build

Build breaks can prevent your team from making progress while you diagnose and correct the problem. You can define a gated check-in build definition to protect some or all of your codebase against build breaks. For more information see:

Walkthrough: Customizing Check-In Policies and Notes

Add Check-In Policies

Use the Builds Check-In Policy to Minimize Code Churn after Breaks to Continuous Builds

Check In Pending Changes that Are Controlled by a Gated Check-in Build

See Also

Concepts

Visual Studio 2010 Product Highlights

Developing the Application