Visual Studio Team Foundation Server – from a newbie’s perspective

Recently I had a chance to set up Visual Studio 2005 Team Foundation Server. I didn’t have a chance to use most of the features (yet), but what I found really nice about it is that using source control from VS 2005 team explorer and importing a new ASP.net project, VS creates for me all the IIS virtual directories. This does save me some timeJ

The installation is pretty straightforward but time-consuming: you need IIS, SQL 2005, Sharepoint Portal Services, SQL Reporting Services. Altogether it claims to need 1GB of RAM. However I am running it in a VM with 500MB and it seems to be able to handle the load of 4-5 people team.

What I miss is the ability to have a web client (additionally to team explorer in VS) for users who can post bugs for example without the need to use VS.

I am running it on a stand-alone machine (not attached to any domain) since I want to utilize the server for many projects, not just one, and usually each project has its own domain. This does not allow for fine-grained access control by integrated windows logon (you have to provide local user credentials). For the time-being I am using a single user and code check-ins are identified by machine, not user. I am still working on a better approach though. If you know some guidance documentation to that on the web, please let me knowJ

Resources:

https://msdn.microsoft.com/vstudio/teamsystem/team/ - homepage

https://blogs.msdn.com/buckh/ - blog on VSTFS

https://teamsystemrocks.com/ - set of short video tutorials and news