Visual Studio Team System, with separate editions for developers, architects, software testers and database programmers, strives to allay collaboration among a development project's team members. In the process, the software development lifecycle is simultaneously shorter and more productive.
Earlier this year, in Beginning Visual Studio Team System development, SearchVB.com linked to resources for help with mapping, planning, scaling and securing VSTS projects, and with hosting those projects on Team Foundation Server. This time around we are pointing to a few very comprehensive general resources.
First up is the VSTS Guidance Project, which Microsoft's patterns & practices group has posted on the company's code-sharing site, CodePlex. This page links to videos and documents that fall into categories such as How-To, Guidelines and Practices at a Glance; practices, for example, covers build, source control, reporting and project management processes. In addition, the Microsoft developers who are responsible for Visual Studio Team System have assembled a list of the blogs, release notes, virtual labs and other resources they use on a regular basis.
Next we have an extensive series of Visual Studio Team System webcasts hosted by Microsoft Canada developer Adam Gallant. Links to each of the 40 webcasts are posted on Gallant's blog. The sessions fall into the following five categories:
- Visual Studio Team System and MSDN Licensing Demystified
- Integrated Team Development with Visual Studio Team System
- Visual Studio Team Foundation Server
- Visual Studio Team Edition for Database Professionals
- Visual Studio Team Edition for Software Testers
Finally we link to two Visual Studio Team System case studies, which we hope can offer some insight into what a VSTS and Team Foundation Server deployment entails.
Visual Studio Team System ups productivity at ParTech demonstrates how a team of 60 developers at five different locations was able to better integrate its development process by making the switch to VSTS from a toolset that included Visual SourceSafe, the ASP.NET based Gemini and Excel, the latter of which served as a report generator.
Meanwhile, Major Media Company Puts the "Team" Back in Software Development takes a look at how the enterprise application group at Clear Channel Communications used the Microsoft Solutions Framework along with VSTS, Team Foundation Server and SharePoint to solidify its project schedule, manage code and incorporate testing, among other things.
