Team Foundation Server on Windows Azure Cloud

Introduction:

In this article we are going to see the latest preview release of Team Foundation Server made available on windows Azure cloud which was introduced in Build Conference a day before(14 Sep 2011). With this preview release we have limited invitation codes available for the members to validate the Team Foundation Services on the cloud.

Note : First 5 Comments on this post will get the free invitation code to work around the TFS Preview.

Overview:

Team Foundation Server Invitaion codes are limited to specific numbers (Initially 250) later on Brain Harry added few more invitation codes for the subscribers. Every member who successfully creates an account will have 5 additional invitation codes that can be distributed to the friends and team to have a work around on the Team Foundation Server with Windows Azure.

To register for the preview access logon to https://tfspreview.com and provide the invitation code to get access immediately. Let us see the step by step process on registering and accessing the Team Foundation Services on the cloud to get some hands on experience for the first time users.
Team Foundation Server on Windows Azure provides much more flexible option to maintain the versioning over the cloud as its very easy to register for an account and get into productive stage early since it takes very less time to register and setup an account with TFS Cloud. The current preview release is not the complete solution of the TFS Functionality but still we can use the below products.

• Source Control
• Work Item Tracking
• Agile Project Management (New in TFS 11)
• Testing
• Build Automation

We can use the below clients to connect to the TFS Cloud once we are done with the successful registration. The client including

• Visual Studio 2010
• Test Professional 2010
• Visual Studio 11 ( Not available except MSDN Subscribers)
• Team Explorer Everywhere
• Microsoft Office Integration

Now let us see the step by step process on how to register the TFS preview for the first time and in our next article we will see how to connect to TFS using a client (Probably the much used Visual Studio 2010)

Steps:

Log on to the site https://tfspreview.com and click on Create Account as shown in the screen below.

Now we can see a new page requesting for the details as shown in the screen below. You need to have a valid invitation code (Thanks to Brain Harry) for providing the code for the preview. Once we provided with the Server URL and Invitation Code click on the Sign Up button as highlighted in the screen below.

 
We will be redirected to a page to authenticate the request by providing the Windows Live Id. Once the authentication is confirmed and the TFS is created for the account we will see the page as shown in the screen below.

We can see TFS Account URL for our request is https://f5debug.tfspreview.com/   

 
We are done with our first step of creating a TFS Server, now moving on to the second step to create the team project. Click on the Create Team Project will open a window requesting for the Team Name and Description of the team as shown in the screen below. Provide the information based on the team requirement.

 
 
If we can see there are 3 project templates available in the preview as well, out of which Agile Software Development is something new and to work on the interesting things around that. In our example we will select the Microsoft Visual Studio Scrum 2.0 Preview 1 as shown in the screen below.

 
 
Once we select with the above options, click on Create Project and we will see the process gets started as shown in the screen below.
 

 
 
We can now see the team project is getting created as shown in the screen below.
 

 
 
Once the team project gets created we can now see the intimation as shown in the screen below. Now click on My team home page button to proceed further and go over and see the new features of the Team Foundation Server on Windows Azure. Else we can also go ahead and download the software required which we will see in our next article.
 

 
 
Once we click on Proceed to My Team Home Page will open a new page with the list of options to maintain the Team foundation server as shown in the screen below.
 

 
 
This page will show the list of options to administrate the Team Foundation Server Projects. Now we are all set to upload our project to our team server and start version and use the most of the team foundation services. Once we are done with the administration click on the ADMINISTRATION button available at the top right side menu as shown in the screen below.

 
 
We will be redirected to the page as shown in the screen below, click on the ACCOUNT button to redirect to the account page to step forward and start downloading the client software.

Once we redirect to the account page we can see the step 3 to download software (client tools) which we will see in our next articles.

 

Conclusion:

In this article we will the New Team Foundation Server on Windows Azure and the steps to register the service and get started with the team project installation. In our next article we will see how to connect the TFS service using one of the client tools.