 | Summaries and Customer Reviews are supplied by Amazon.com In complex software projects, managing the development process can be as critical to success as writing the code itself. A project may involve dozens of developers, managers, architects, testers, and customers, hundreds of builds, and thousands of opportunities to get off-track. To keep tabs on the people, tasks, and components of a medium- to large-scale project, most teams use a development system that allows for easy monitoring, follow-up, and accountability. Microsoft Team Foundation Server 2008 (TFS), the server component of Microsoft's Visual Studio Team System (VSTS), provides a powerful collaborative platform for software-development teams. The product offers an integrated toolset for tracking work items, creating test cases, managing source code, generating builds, constructing database schemas, and so on. Because in software development one size does not fit all, TFS provides process customization, project management, and reporting capabilities to build solutions around your requirements. Team Foundation Server 2008 in Action is a hands-on guide to Team Foundation Server 2008. Written for developers with a good handle on TFS basics, this book shows you how to solve real-life problems. It's not a repetition of Microsoft's product documentation. Team Foundation Server 2008 in Action is a practitioner's handbook for how to work with TFS under common constraints. This book walks you through real-life software engineering problems based on hundreds of hours of TFS experience. You'll benefit from expert author Jamil Azher's extensive interactions with members of Microsoft's TFS team and MVPs, survey feedback from the author's blog, and interviews with organizations and user groups using TFS. Instead of just offering a high-level overview, the book provides detailed solutions for solving common-and not-so-common-problems using TFS. It discusses the strengths as well as weaknesses of TFS, and suggests appropriate problem resolution steps, workarounds, or custom solutions. |
Average Customer Rating:    A book that cannot define its audience A compilation of somewhat unrelated chapters on TFS, in no apparent order, and with various levels of details.
Definitively not a good introduction to TFS. Probably not worth the price for somebody already knowledgeable with TFS.
Excellent Book! Very Informative and I highly recommend this book. This is an incredibly helpful book with the focus on real-world examples and a must-have for Application Lifecycle Management (ALM) practitioners.
Succinct, clear, and comprehensive; this book provides you a solid foundation and practical insights on how to use Team Foundation Server (TFS) effectively in your organization.
One of the highlights of this book is that it covers the key topics like Team Build, Branching Models, Customizing and Extending TFS at exactly the right level.
The real world scenarios and practical code samples helps you to understand the power, complexity, and benefits of TFS.
This is a, credible, engaging, and a well-written book. Simply a must-have!
Weird Focus, Strange Order of Topics I was a little shocked and taken aback by the structure of the book. The chapters seem to follow a very odd (to say the least) progression in what I still can't figure out, would be the intention of the author to communicate.
If you are new to planning, configuring and administering Team Foundation Server 2008, then this book will confuse the heck out of you. I have "some" experience with it, and maybe that pre-empted expectations, but it certainly confused me.
It goes from an introduction of the platform in general to and an overview of VSTS Database Edition (talk about coming from the left on this one) and from there to... Team Build. Really? Configuring a build server is not the most natural *first* step in getting to work with TFS, i'd think. Important? Surely, but in my mind's eye it would be more relevant to talk about how to setup projects, configure the portals, talk about setting up additional templates, check-in policies, permissions... you name it... but hey, he decided he wants to talk about a the automated build process before the reader has an idea on how to get the source into the server that would ultimately feed the build.
From there it goes into branching... again, my point remains, you can't branch (or build) what you don't have. So, although the content in these sections seems to be of good, acceptable quality, it is the organization, focus and delivery of the material in the book that I have a problem with.
That being said, the book doesn't cover those areas I'd expect a book on TFS "in action" would. Chapter 9 contained the content I found most helpful, and in my opinion should have been towards the front of the book, not the back close to the very end. It is a okay book It is a good book with lots good information, but most of these information you can get from the MS documentation. So it is good to have this book, but you don't have to have this book. This book doesn't know what it wants to be. I bought this book hoping it would be a good overview of TFS from an administrative perspective. Unfortunately, the book can't quite decide the level of detail it should offer. It glosses over major parts of TFS like process templates and work items and barely even considers the customization of a process template. On the other hand, it goes into excruciating detail about team build, and devotes a whole chapter to VSTS DB edition (come on...really? a whole chapter?).
Additionally, the book can't seem to decide what level of familiarity you should have with TFS. In many places it assumes that you know a great deal about TFS, but in others it gives entirely too much information that you could pretty easily figure out yourself. It also refers to MSDN articles a lot. If I wanted to trudge through MSDN articles, I would have done so and not bought a book.
The title of this book suggests that it covers TFS 2008 in a general way, but this simply isn't the case. It would be more appropriate to say that this book covers some thorny problems that the author has encountered in his use of TFS. If it had been titled "Advanced TFS Tips & Tricks", I wouldn't have bought it, but at least I would have known that the book wasn't what I was looking for.
I don't mean to dismiss the book entirely, the sections on branching and team build offer some solutions to common problems, but really, there are already books out there on team build and MSBuild that go into much more detail, and there are plenty of discussions out there about branching best practices.
It's a shame, because the author does seem to know what he's talking about, and I have been hard pressed to find a good soup to nuts book on TFS. Maybe he ought to write one of those. |  |
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