Microsoft has released the final version of Team Foundation Server (TFS) 2015, the company’s on-premises application lifecycle management (ALM), DevOps and development team collaboration tool.
TFS 2015, available here, provides a range of new capabilities throughout the development process with special emphasis on DevOps, Microsoft said. TFS covers the entire application lifecycle. It provides source code management via either Team Foundation Version Control or Git, reporting, requirements management, project management, automated builds, lab management, testing and release management capabilities.
TFS 2015 expands the “Basic” license to include Web-based test execution, agile portfolio management, work item chart authoring and team rooms. What this means is that all teams of five or fewer members with a “Basic” license have access to these features using Team Web Access for free, while larger teams can access this functionality at a much lower price point.
Microsoft made several improvements to the Agile project management capabilities in TFS, including hierarchical backlog management, customizable cards, swim lanes, definition of done, split columns, inline edit, search and filter, and more, Brian Harry, Microsoft’s Developer Division corporate vice president in charge of Team Foundation Server and Visual Studio Online, said in a blog post.
TFS 2015 also brings a major overhaul to the Team Foundation Server build system “that not only addresses numerous points of customer feedback—like a Web UI, change auditing, better agent pool management, high availability, etc., but also unlocks whole new worlds by creating a dramatically simpler extensibility model, providing tasks for building almost anything you want—Java, Android, iOS, Node.js and more, and a cross-platform agent that enables you to build on any platform you choose,” Harry said.
The new release offers more Agile development features than before. “Building on the new Build pipeline, extensibility model and cross-platform agents, we’ve enabled continuous delivery like never before,” Harry said.
Users can choose from a variety of tasks that will provision Azure infrastructure for their application, deploy the app, run high-volume test automation with a new distributed test execution capability, run load tests, run functional tests on third-party device clouds and more, he said.
“All of this enables you to create a completely automated build-deploy-test-monitor continuous delivery pipeline for friction-free flow of code into production,” Harry noted.
Also in this release, Microsoft added the ability to make a quick edit to a file in version control directly from your Web browser and then commit those changes straight back to the service. When browsing a source file, developers now have an Edit command that puts the file into editing mode. Changes can then be made inline, complete with color coding and formatting support. As soon as a user clicks the Save command, the system creates a new commit/changeset with the changes included.
In addition, TFS 2015 brings along the extensibility capabilities Microsoft introduced in Visual Studio Online over the past year. This enables users to integrate Team Foundation Server with hundreds of their favorite tools with REST, Service Hooks and OAuth.