Visual Studio Team Services (previously called Visual Studio Online)

Visual Studio Online is now Visual Studio Team Services and extends its features. It is an on-cloud Team Foundation Server (TFS) and so it is a set of complementary cloud basis services that help a team to write code better in an agile way: agile project management tools, code browsing, editing, repository, build services, tests run, management of test cases, deploy app, telemetry on your app (Application Insight) and better understand how your app performing from the traffic and performance prospective.

As said yesterday in the Connect(); 2015 event at New York, Microsoft changed the name of Visual Studio Online to Visual Studio Team Services to help make it clear in the name that these cloud development services have become a central part of agile team collaboration and DevOps services. New features in Team Services include a plugin for IntelliJ IDEA, a new customizable and task-based Build service, dashboards that provide visibility into a team’s progress, and preview extensions for Code Search, Package Management, and Release Management. The team has a number of posts on the Visual Studio ALM blog where you can explore all these improvements in depth.

If you do not want to install and configure Team Foundation Server (TFS 2015) at your premises, you might prefer to consider using a free Visual Studio Team Services account for personal use. Because it’s in the cloud, you won’t have to install SQL Server and TFS on your own hardware and you won’t need to do things like manage your own backups.

The prices are available here, and you can also use the Azure Prizing Calculator: up to 5 free basic users (that can check-in code, build, can invite other people to participate to that team project …) and you can have unlimited private team projects. Moreover, if you have an MSDN account, you can use the 128€/month credit you have for using Azure services.

If you go on the MSDN account page, you can find the Create a Visual Studio Team Service account link as follows and you can create from there a new team project in the cloud.

Create a Visual Studio Team Services account from MSDN

New team project in the cloud.

Overview page

Team Project Dashboard – Overview (empty)

Team Project Dashboard – Overview (example)

Team Project – Code (repository)

Team Project – Work (features, backlog items, sprints)

Team Project – Work (backlog item)

Team Project – Work (backlog items)

Team Project – Test

Team Project – Releases

Team room

Team users

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In the following there are some links useful to understand how to start with Visual Studio Team Services / Visual Studio Online:

Visual Studio Team Services
Sign up for Visual Studio Team Services
DevOps and Application Lifecycle Management
Documentation
Learn how easy it is to set up Visual Studio and connect to Visual Studio Online: get started.
Microsoft Accademy – Fundamentals of Visual Studio Online
Channel 9 – Getting Started with Visual Studio Online
Getting Started with Source Control with Visual Studio Online
Slide share – Introducing Visual Studio Online
DevOps Fundamentals (Channel 9 course)
Periodic Table of DevOps tools

Courses on “agile”

On the Microsoft Virtual Accademy there are a lot of useful courses on agile technologies (not necessarily related to Microsoft products):

https://mva.microsoft.com/search/SearchResults.aspx#!q=agile&index=2&lang=1033$1040
Lean Philosophy
Fundamentals of Lean Software Delivery Jump Start
Introduzione a DevOps
Integrate, Deliver, and Deploy Continuously with Cloud DevOps
DevOps Courses
Fundamentals of Visual Studio Online (ora rinominato Visual Studio Team Services ma è lo stesso prodotto)

Webcasts

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To create UML modeling projects and diagrams, you have to install Visual Studio Enterprise, the only one that have also specific architecture and modeling features.