Team Foundation Server Update 2 Released -- Visual Studio Magazine

Team Foundation Server Update 2 Released

Unlike Visual Studio 2013 Update 2, TFS isn't a release candidate.

By Keith Ward
04/03/2014

Although Visual Studio 2013 Update 2 came out yesterday as a release candidate (RC), not everything released with it was in a pre-finalized state. Team Foundation Server (TFS) Update 2, for example, came out as an official product, not an RC.

Confused? Don't be, says Microsoft Technical Fellow Brian Harry. "It's weird that we RTMed TFS Update to but only RCed VS Update 2," Harry blogged yesterday. "We generally work hard to RTM them at the same time. This time we couldn't. The reason had to do with some hard dates with regard to VS Online and on-premises TFS compatibility with it."

Since Visual Studio 2013 Update 2 isn't in a final version, "we made the difficult decision to release them at different times," Harry said. He also mentioned that there are no compatibility issues between the two products.

S. Somasegar, corporate vice president of the Developer Division at Microsoft, mentioned in his blog that TFS 2013 Update 2 provides "dozens of new features," including Git improvements, backlog management in TFS Web Access, support for tags throughout Visual Studio and improvements to lightweight charting.

Another blog posting, from Charles Sterling of the Application Lifecycle Management team, dug into more detail on the TFS 2013 Update 2 upgrades. He said there are more than 30 "...JUST in the ALM space alone!"

Among them are new testing and monitoring tools within Application Insights, a technology introduced in TFS last November that provides feedback on application performance and usage through telemetry data across environments. It includes coded UI testing for the just-announced new version of Windows Phone, Windows Phone 8.1.

Another enhancement is cloud based load testing within Application Insights. "This integration gives you insight and diagnostics directly from a load test," Sterling blogged.

TFS is Microsoft's chief code collaboration tool. Team Foundation Server is the on-premises version. The cloud-based version used to be called Team Foundation Services, but was replaced with Visual Studio Online last year. TFS 2013 Update 2 is available from Microsoft's download site. It requires 64-bit version of Windows Server 2008 R2 or better, and any version of Windows 7 or better for the client.

About the Author

Keith Ward is the editor in chief of Virtualization & Cloud Review. Follow him on Twitter @VirtReviewKeith.

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