Review – Professional Team Foundation Server 2012

We went through a general overview of the platform, a detailed deep dive on the client, it’s now time for the server part of Visual Studio ALM: Team Foundation Server.

This book is considered as ‘the Bible’ for everyone who deals with Team Foundation Server. It covers in details everything you have to know and everything you should know about it.

Why did I say that? “have to know” and “should know”?

The reason is fairly easy: the book is not just a compendium of documentation, how-tos, etc., but it empowers direct experience from the field. So the authors (Ed Blankenship – Program Manager for Test and Lab Management, Martin Woodward – Program Manager for Team Foundation Server cross-platform tools, Grant Holliday – Senior Premier Field Engineer and Brian Keller – Principal Technical Evangelist for Visual Studio ALM) shared the knowledge they got from years of experience, in order to provide the most complete book on the topic.

The table of content is pretty straightforward: it covers from the deployment planning to the administration and all the maintenance activities, 27 chapters in total.

As a sample of the direct experience from the field I was mentioning before, it is worth a look at the chapter regarding the deployment planning: there you can find even a basic estimation on times, really useful if you are not into the product and you need to have a rough order of magnitude on the required effort.

It’s still a great purchase, even if you already have the 2010 version. The book has been updated with all the new stuff of the 2012 release, and it’s worth having it if you work with Team Foundation Server in a role which is not the ‘end user’.