Should we upgrade to TFS 2012?

If you are a developer

You might find it as exciting or frustrating depending on the kind of visual studio you use. I use VS 2010 Prof and even if I upgrade to VS 2012, my license would be still prof. Here are some features that I find interesting and the license it would need.

I totally like code review feature and I always thought that this would be the solution that can help in auditing the development process compliance. sadly it needs ultimate

 

Other features you might be interested in async Check outs, 3 way merges on check-in.

If you are not a Visual Studio user

Microsoft has done a fabulous job in rebuilding TFS Web access and making it a real sprint planning and tracking tool. They have  completely re-done the web layer using MVC – Webforms and complete experience is ajax and amazing.

All right! You are going to love this.

Home Page

On your face. You have your all your alerts in tiles. You can add any query as a team favorite and it can be put on home page. You can add a build definition or a Source control item as favorite and you can add them here too.

Other feature you have is, now you can assign dates to iterations. So on your home page you see current iteration and its burn down.

Work Page

Right thing in right place. Click on the current iteration, you get the following screen.

What else do you need? You can do work distribution, look at the the stories and the work break down and the progress all in one screen. One screen good enough to get the project manger’s head ticking . ‘oh god, just 12 days remaining’

Other tab takes you to resource capacity planning.

Other feature that makes it webby is, the in context menu items.

Board

Many of the sprint planning tools always boasted about this. You drag and drop a work item when your team watches you. Now you have it in TFS.

If you are a sprint planner or a project manager, you would be happy by now. And would shout loud

UPGRADE….!!!!!!

Other cool features in ‘Web access’ I would like to cover in other posts are

1. Query builder
2. Alerts editor over web
3. Source control explorer with history and file compare
4. Build explorer
5. Feedback tool integration
6. Concept of teams
7. Web control panel

Overall, I am thrilled about it. Next step for me is to develop timesheet extension for this. MS is not responding to my questions on developing the web access extension .