Customer Reviews

Professional Team Foundation Server

5 star:		(3)
4 star:		(0)
3 star:		(0)
2 star:		(1)
1 star:		(0)

 

 

Team Foundation Server (TFS) is a new Microsoft product designed to help development teams better manage the software development cycle. It is a huge product, just installing and configuring it is a big task because you need to deal with Windows SharePoint Services, SQL Server 2005, SQL Server Reporting Services, a data warehouse, a build server, a proxy server and of course, TFS itself. Where do you start? How do you plan such a large deployment inside your company? How the decisions that you take right now will affect you in the future?

Professional Team Foundation Server is a book that will help smooth out the installation process and help you better understand the beast that is TFS. The target audience is not the average developer; in fact, the book targets a few roles: the lead developer, the IT administrator or the person responsible to install and maintain TFS, the project manager.

Part one covers the TFS installation, how to plan for it and the maintenance so it's IT focused. Part two covers how to create projects and what process template to select so it's project management focused. Part three covers how to extend and customize TFS so it's more developer focused and lastly, part four covers management.

I was very impressed by the quality of the information presented in this book. Two of the authors are Team System MVPs so they know their stuff. You'll find lots of hard to find tips; the kind of tips you would have liked to know before doing the install. It is an invaluable book and it should be mandatory reading for anyone wanting to install, configure, support, extend and manage TFS. It is a great reference book that will help smooth out any TFS installation. High praises of Professional Team Foundation Server.

There are a lot of books on Microsoft's Studio Team System that are written from the standpoint of the developer involved with a team development project. These books seem to be lacking the first forty pages or so. That is, they don't explain just what it is that you are trying to do, how to set up a development team, how to administer the Team System software.

It turns out that there's a lot more than forty pages in this book, but it covers exactly those points. The book is specifically aimed at project managers, administrators, and IT professionals who are charged with implementing a project.

Part one of the book covers planning and implementation of the Team System software and of the project itself. This of course includes working with security and the foundation for server backup and recovery.

The second and third parts of the book is the creation of the project itself and the customization of the Team Software system to fit your particular project.

The last section includes management of the project from initial steps through completing the project and performing a postmortem as preparation for the next one.

This book help me to solve several problems in my company. I recommend.

Fabio Camara

I bought this book in order to learn how to use VS in a TFS environment. I soon relized that this book was not for me. As it says on the back of the book; The book is for project managers, IT administrators etc.