Visual Studio Team System Goodies

Wow, it's been an exciting couple of weeks for Visual Studio Team System users. Generally I don’t like to be an echo chamber for what you can pick up in the blogosphere, but these items were too good to pass up and I wanted to highlight them just in case you missed them.

1) We announced on Monday that Microsoft has acquired TeamPlain who makes the popular TeamPlain Web Access for connecting to Team Foundation Server via your browser. Not only is this a good solution for cross-platform access to TFS, but it also enables the casual user w/o Team Explorer installed to check in on project status or even contribute to a project (manipulate work items, source code, etc.). The best news is that with this acquisition we are making TeamPlain available for FREE to anybody who is properly licensed for a TFS CAL. For more details see https://blogs.msdn.com/bharry/archive/2007/03/26/microsoft-acquires-teamplain.aspx.

2) The patterns and practices team recently published a broad set of prescriptive guidance for Team Foundation Server/VSTS. See https://blogs.msdn.com/jmeier/archive/2007/03/26/vsts-guidance-project-update.aspx.

3) By popular demand we have published about 40 pages of guidance on branching and merging strategies with Team Foundation Server. Check out https://www.codeplex.com/BranchingGuidance.

You’ll note that #2 and #3 are hosted as Wikis on CodePlex. We’re trying a new publishing model where we’ll use CodePlex as an agile publishing surface, at least until we stabilize and decide to move things into the MSDN Library. So please leave comments in the Wiki if you have suggestions or questions which aren't addressed by the guidance.

Enjoy!