News

License Changes Mean More TFS 2015 Feature Flexibility

Changes in licensing allows anyone with the basic CAL to get access to features that were available only to premium subscribers.

Team Foundation Server 2015 wasn't released with the rest of the products earlier this week, but there have been a few developments on TFS as it makes its way to being feature complete. Earlier this week, Microsoft's Brian Harry blogged about some of the licensing changes that affect the types of services that will be made available.

For one, there have been changes to specific Agile Project Management features -- agile planning, chart authoring, team rooms, and the Web-based test experience from within the test hub -- that allow for those features to be used with a basic TFS CAL. "Many features that were only available if you purchased VS Premium with MSDN, VS Ultimate with MSDN or Test Professional with MSDN are now available in the TFS CAL," writes Harry.

The Visual Studio Test Professional Subscription licensing has also been tweaked, in which VS Online user can now use Test Professional for $60 per month. Harry wrote that user feedback showed some popularity for allowing users to get at Test Professionals "full set of testing capabilities, including lab management, rich data collectors." At some point, Harry wrote, the changes will filter down so users can take advantage of those testing features using on-premises TFS 2015.

Two non-licensing changes might also have some impact on TFS users. One is the integration of Team Explorer UI into the suite, which means it can no longer be used stand-alone. It has the potential to impact "non-developer users who want to use our Office integration capabilities," he wrote. "As such, in the TFS 2015 Update 1 timeframe, we will create a new installer that has just the Office integration and related components (without the Team Explorer VS shell). Until then, I'd recommend non-developers continue to use Team Explorer 2013."

The other new change is storyboarding, which will be added to TFS 2015 at Update 1; meanwhile, that feature is now available in Visual Studio 2015 Community Edition.

There are a number of other changes affecting TFS 2015 and VS 2015 that Harry details in his blog here.

About the Author

You Tell 'Em, Readers: If you've read this far, know that Michael Domingo, Visual Studio Magazine Editor in Chief, is here to serve you, dear readers, and wants to get you the information you so richly deserve. What news, content, topics, issues do you want to see covered in Visual Studio Magazine? He's listening at [email protected].

comments powered by Disqus

Featured

  • GitHub Previews Agentic AI in VS Code Copilot

    GitHub announced a raft of improvements to its Copilot AI in the Visual Studio Code editor, including a new "agent mode" in preview that lets developers use the AI technology to write code faster and more accurately.

  • Copilot Engineering in the Cloud with Azure and GitHub

    Who better to lead a full-day deep dive into this tech than two experts from GitHub, which introduced the original "AI pair programmer" and spawned the ubiquitous Copilot moniker?

  • Uno Platform Wants Microsoft to Improve .NET WebAssembly in Two Ways

    Uno Platform, a third-party dev tooling specialist that caters to .NET developers, published a report on the state of WebAssembly, addressing some shortcomings in the .NET implementation it would like to see Microsoft address.

  • Random Neighborhoods Regression Using C#

    Dr. James McCaffrey from Microsoft Research presents a complete end-to-end demonstration of the random neighborhoods regression technique, where the goal is to predict a single numeric value. Compared to other ML regression techniques, advantages are that it can handle both large and small datasets, and the results are highly interpretable.

  • As Some Orgs Restrict DeepSeek AI Usage, Microsoft Offers Models and Dev Guidance

    While some organizations are restricting employee usage of the new open source DeepSeek AI from a Chinese company due to data collection concerns, Microsoft has taken a different approach.

Subscribe on YouTube

Upcoming Training Events