Team Foundation Server 2008 in Action: Review (Part 1 of 5)
This is the first of 5 planned book review posts, on the exciting new book titled "Team Foundation Server 2008 in Action", ISBN: 1933988592, authored by Jamil Azher. Manning Publications asked a number of TFS MVPs to review the book and although I just recently re-started the review late, due to family issues and associated delays, I nevertheless hope that these will be in time and of value to you and the publishers.
All comments are based on the unedited DRAFT I have received from the publisher and therefore observations or issues I highlight may already be resolved by the author. My personal conclusion and recommendation of the potential readers will be included in part 5, scheduled for Friday ... "touch wood".
Today I re-read chapters 1 and 2, the former of which is available for free from here. This post comments on these two chapters.
Chapter 1 - TFS and the Practice of Software Development
You can review this section yourself by reading the freely available chapter. In my opinion it gives a good overview of TFS as an Application Lifecycle Management (ALM) system and the bits and pieces making up TFS.
Chapter 2 - Exploring the Changes in TFS 2008
Anyone who has written a technical book will realise that by the time the early DRAFTs of the book are available for review, many of the sections are already out of date. This is evident in chapter 2, which has obviously not included the enhancements we enjoyed in Power Tool releases or more importantly, in the recent Service Pack 1 release for TFS 2008 and VSTS 2008. The chapter, nevertheless, gives a great introduction to the TFS 2008 enhancements, including Build, Version Control, Annotations and Offline support. A huge emphasis is placed on the build, which is great as it is an extremely unexplored territory ... and you will notice that future chapters are also heavily focused on the build environment.
Two great sample programs make this chapter a winner:
- Sample program for queuing builds to the "least busy" Build Agent
- Sample program that determines which Build contains a particular fix
The latter sample program can save you many, many, many, ... hours of manually exploring build reports, viewing their associated work items, and finding the build that includes a certain work item.
Wish List
My personal wish list to the author and the publisher to date, whereby I will carry over the list to the next posts:
- Include a summary of the option "defaults", for the various options discussed in the chapter. This would allow the reader to go to the table summarising the options, rather than having to trawl entire sections looking for the option description.
- Use or refer to many of the illustrations and quick-reference posters created by many TFS specialists and MVPs. The quick reference posters that would be appropriate for the first two sections include:
- 0202 Microsoft Team System Build Process
- 0202 Microsoft Team System Editions 2008
- 0202 Microsoft Team System Environments
- 0202 Microsoft Team System Licensing Overview
- 0202 Microsoft Team System Planning
- 0202 Microsoft Team System Project Capacity Planning 2008
- 0202 Microsoft Team System Project Planning
- At this stage the book is missing the section that I looked for immediately and believe is one of the most important sections of any TFS book, namely planning a TFS deployment, including capacity planning, team planning, source control planning, branching and dependency planning and licensing planning.
At this stage I am looking forward to re-reading the next few chapters. See you tomorrow, for part 2, covering chapters "Introducing VSTS 2008 Database Edition" and "Understanding Branching in Version Control".