Originally posted as Team Foundation Server 2013 Preview is available and Go-Live on Where Technology Meets Teamwork - Thoughts on TFS, Lean, Agile, Kanban, Scrum and other collaborative technologies and techniques
At Build this week Steve Ballmer announced the blue wave of products from Microsoft. This included Windows Server 2012 R2, Windows Client 8.1, and most importantly Visual Studio 2013 and Team Foundation Server 2013.
While they may be in preview, a Go-Live license has been provided which means that it is fully supported for production. At this time (2 days after it became available) we have completed a production move for one of our customers to Team Foundation Server 2013.
The upgrade to Team Foundation Server 2013
Although this is a major release for the Team Foundation Server team the changes that they have made to the database are not substantial. This means that the upgrade itself, while requiring a reboot to install .NET 4.5.1, is very fast. And how fast is fast you may ask. Well for a 2TB database it took less than 4 minutes to complete the database upgrade. The total process is less than 45 minutes end-to-end. The only caveat is that you will need a minimum of SQL Server 2012 SP1 for Team Foundation Server 2013.
Figure: Very quick upgrade to Team Foundation Server 2013
Although there were problems with Team Foundation Server 2012 QU1 (2012.1) and QU2 (2012.2) the product team has certainly pulled out all the stops for both QU3 (2012.3) and 2013.
The new ALM features in Team Foundation Server 2013
Check out more posts from the folks at Northwest Cadence around the new features on 2013:
- Get Visual Studio 2013 Team Foundation Server while its hot! (Martin Hinshelwood)
- Git – TFS Integration – Why it matters (Dan Wood)
- Load Testing with Team Foundation Service (James Tupper)
There are many more insight into the features and usage of Visual Studio ALM 2013 to come… watch this space…
Northwest Cadence can help you implement a modern application life-cycle. Call rick.flath@nwcadence.com today to help you get there more easily...