Professional Team Foundation Server 2013

If the book “Professional Application Lifecycle Management With Visual Studio 2013” is the perfect companion for all members of a software project team using Visual Studio ALM ecosystem, Professional Team Foundation Server 2013 is aimed mainly to “TFS Administrators”.

This book covers every information needed to operate with TFS, it starts with a series of chapters dedicated to Planning, Installing and configuring TFS in your environment, giving you all the details to install the configuration that most suites your need.  Even if it targets TFS Administrators, this book contains also a lot of information about all the various feature of TFS and can be used to discover all the new functionality introduced with 2013 version. The level of details is really good, as an example in the section dedicated to Source Control you can find an entire chapter dedicated to how to Migrate from Legacy Version Control System.

Since this book is aimed to the people that will guide the adoption of TFS in your organization, there are lots of chapters devoted to customization. You can find information on how you can modify Process Templates as well as how you can personalize the build. Customization is a key point, because TFS is a flexible tools that should be configured to adapt to your team instead making your team adapt to TFS.

But the real value of this book is the last section, entirely devoted to Administration. TFS is the core tool for every member of the team, as a TFS administrator you need to be sure that it runs as smoothly as possible and without interruption. Chapter 22 is devoted to scalability and High Availability, a must to read for every company that is medium size of above, because a single server running all the roles of TFS is usually suitable only for small teams. Chapters 23 is another must-to-read because it explain how to deal with Disaster Recovery and how to backup and restore your TFS in case of something went wrong. Finally Chapter 25 gives you all the details on how to monitor your server for Health and Performance.

Finally there are chapters devoted to: Lab Management, upgrading your TFS Server and working with Geographically distributed Teams. Every person that find itself in the role of Administering or managing the adoption of TFS should have a copy of this book in the bookshelf.

Gian Maria.