Branching guidance now available

I'm extremely excited to announce the availability of Branching guidance for Team Foundation Server.  This was a collaborative effort between the TFS product team and members of our "Ranger" program who are focused on accelerating adoption of V1.  While the product documentation will tell you how each of our tools works, it doesn't provide insight into the best practice usage of each.  The guidance that we recently released attempts to fill that gap in the area of version control and how to best work with branches. 

One thing about the Ranger team is that they straddle the fence between our customers and the product team.  So, what you'll read in this guidance isn't some theoretical description of how things should work in a perfect world but instead has been pressure tested and proved to be effective through actual TFS projects.  In fact, you'll find examples pulled directly from our own teams experiences as well. 

The other exciting thing about this effort is that it's been posted on https://www.codeplex.com which means that we're poised to take your feedback and incorporate it directly into the guidance.  So, it's bound to get better over time with your help. 

Here's the high level overview:

  • Introduction
  • Parallel Development
  • Branching Defined
  • Creating Isolation in Team Foundation Server
  • General Branching Structure Guidance
  • Branching Strategies
  • Broad Areas of Branching Isolation
  • Creating Your Branching Strategy
  • Defining Your Code Promotion Model
  • Feature Crews: How Microsoft Does It
  • End-to-End Implementation Scenario
  • Appendix

Enough talk...go take a look for yourself:  view the branching guidance online

Congrats to John, Mario and Graham for their hard work here...hope you like it!

Woohoo!