My team uses visualstudio.com (previously Team Foundation Services, a.k.a cloud-based TFS) and I'd like to also make use of Release Management Server. I think I know the answer is that this is only possible with an on-premises instance of Team Foundation Server but would like confirmation. I've found this statement from December 2013 but looking for any more recent info:
Team Foundation Server support:
TFS 2010, TFS 2012 and TFS 2013 versions are supported with Release Management for Visual Studio 2013
Visual Studio Online account not supported yet, we plan to add this capability soon.
Found at the bottom of this page:
http://blogs.msdn.com/b/visualstudioalm/archive/2013/12/19/how-to-configure-team-foundation-server-with-release-management.aspx
There is no native integration. But as of Update 2, you can trigger a release from the command line. Which in turn will allow you to modify your build process (assuming your build agent is on-premise and not hosted) to trigger the release automatically. The following blog post provides details: http://blogs.msdn.com/b/visualstudioalm/archive/2014/04/04/release-management-continuous-deployment-with-visual-studio-online-and-any-ci-systems.aspx
Update:
Microsoft is working on bringing the Release Management client features into the VSO Web inteface. This was announce in February and named as Release Management Service of this year and a working demo was show on \build of this year.
Source:
Latest Blog Announcement: http://blogs.msdn.com/b/visualstudioalm/archive/2015/04/29/release-management-announcements-at-build-2015.aspx
In depth demo of UI and new features (relevant part starts around minute 25): http://channel9.msdn.com/Events/Build/2015/3-649
Release Management is not available yet for Visual Studio Online.
As you pointed out, they are busy working on it, but there have been no concrete announcements as to when it is planned to be released.
Related
Is Microsoft still working on both products? Has development on TFS been dropped in favour of VSTS?
For context, we are using TFS right now and VSTS clearly has better integration. Specifically with Microsoft Teams and ZenDesk which is important to getting our workflow process in a more manageable state. However, VSTS doesn't have anywhere near the configuration or reporting that we require.
Will either product eventually have the full feature set or will we have to choose and build our own integrations or reporting?
Now Azure DevOps and Azure DevOps Server, but the rest of the story remains intact.
Visual Studio Team Services (VSTS) and Team Foundation Server (TFS) are based on the same codebase. VSTS is deployed to the cloud every 3 weeks or faster. TFS has received a major upgrade yearly (2015, 2017, 2018) and a major update pack every 3 to 4 months (2015.0-3, 2017.0-3, 2018.0-1).
Most new features are released to Visual Studio Team Services first and are integrated into Team Foundation Server with a bit of a delay. Some features are available in VSTS which depend on cloud resources, so they're not likely to move to TFS anytime soon.
With regards to reporting, this has been a bit of an Achilles' heel of VSTS. It has never had the Report Server and Analysis Cube capabilities of TFS. It does offer integration with PowerBI and that integration is quickly getting better.
You can see the overview of feature availability between cloud (VSTS) and server (TFS) on the Feature Timeline, as you can see a lot of new things happening, most of them are hitting VSTS first.
Microsoft offers a support lifecycle for Team Foundation Server and currently, it looks like Microsoft won't abandon their on-premise customers anytime soon. TFS 2018 has an extended support lifecycle all the way to 2028:
Products Released Lifecycle Start Date Mainstream Support End Date Extended Support End Date Service Pack Support End Date Notes
Visual Studio Team Foundation Server 2018 11/15/2017 1/10/2023 1/11/2028
In respect to the following question Is there a way to easily share Workspace settings (folder mappings) for Visual Studio Online / Team Foundation Server? and an entry I found regarding to this topic https://social.msdn.microsoft.com/Forums/vstudio/en-US/c9b16b30-4534-4781-a2e8-fb413a2df0af/power-tools-for-tfs-2017-with-vs-2017-rc?forum=tfsgeneral I wanted to ask if anyone knows how to achieve this very much needed functionality in TFS 2017?
Thanks.
Unfortunately we cannot create the workspace templates with VS 2017 for now.
According to release notes it says most of the previous Power Tools have been integrated into TFS 2017 that means no separate power tools for TFS 2017.
But the Team Utilities feature component is not integrated, that means these haven't shipped for Visual Studio 2017.
I have submitted a user voice here for you to suggest this feature, you can go and vote it up to achieve it in future.
Another similar thread for your reference: Team Members Team Utilities section in VS 2017
I'm planning a move from Jira to Team Foundation Server (TFS) 2015 and I can't find a good method of migrating the data between the two systems.
Are there any good methods out there ?
My company recently moved from Jira to TFS. I ended up writing my own utility to do the migration.
I've since published it as open source and it can be found on GitHub here:
https://github.com/KilskyreMan/JiraToTfs.git
The project will compile and run under Visual Studio 2015. It offers various mapping abilities via a GUI that should allow you (if needed) tailor your import.
Hope this helps - Ian.
For now, no documentation mentions how to migrate from Jira to TFS, but there are some plugins to have two-way sync between TFS and Jira, you can take a look at them:
TFS4JIRA (About About TFS4JIRA, you can get more information at https://confluence.spartez.com/display/TFS4JIRA/About+TFS4JIRA)
UseTFS
Atlassian Connector for Visual Studio
I installed Visual Studio 2015 Enterprise RTM and only seeing "references" from Code Lens. We are using TFS for source control. I expect to see related commits from TFS. Based on this article, I have everything enabled in options:
Here is what I see in VS:
Is there anything wrong with my VS setup?
The TFVC lenses that are part of CodeLens only work when connected to a version of Team Foundation Server that is running the background job that generates the historical data. This means that you need to be running at least TFS 2013 or 2015 in order for this feature to work. Some features require a specific version of Visual Studio.
It is also possible that your server admin has disabled indexing on the server, one can do that using the tfsconfig codeindex command on the application tier.
I wish we could use multiple build controllers on the same machine because we have many team project collections but they're not used at the same time so there's no real performance issue here and most of our build servers are not used for extended period of time. I know it's possible to do this with TFS 2010 and TFS 2012 (see following post) but it's an unsupported feature.
Anyone can tell me if it's now officially supported with TFS 2013, I've not been able to find any useful information about this.
This is still an unsupported feature. This feature would be loudly trompetted should it arrive.
On the chances of this arriving in the TFS 2013 updates, I don't expect it. Maybe with TFS v14 (they're skipping v13) or maybe the version after that?
Make your voice heard on UserVoice:
http://visualstudio.uservoice.com/forums/121579-visual-studio/suggestions/2037679-remove-one-one-binding-between-collection-and-buil
http://visualstudio.uservoice.com/forums/121579-visual-studio/suggestions/4417771-use-a-build-controller-over-more-than-one-team-pro
http://visualstudio.uservoice.com/forums/121579-visual-studio/suggestions/3872254-tfs-2012-possibility-to-have-more-than-one-build
Update
A new build system was introduced in TFS 2015 and Visual Studio Team Services. It's agent based. doesn't have Controllers and you can install multiple agents on a single machine.
Agents are grouped in Pools and live at the Server level, allowing you to use them across collections.