The book goes into great detail about stand-alone installations of TFS but what if I want to try Visual Studio Online. How is it configured? How is in connected to SharePoint? What are the underlying SQL connections and availability? etc.

Thank you.

Kevin

Hi Kevin,

You're correct in that the book focuses on on-premises installations of TFS. We refer to Visual Studio Online, but not in great depth.

There is a lot of information online about how to get started with Visual Studio Online. The best place to start is probably at the source - visualstudio.com.

In answer to your specific questions, configuring it is all done online, and there's very little to do. It's all running on hosted infrastructure so you don't need to worry about any of that. When you sign up, you'll get a single Project Collection (DefaultCollection) and you can create as many Team Projects in that as you need. Authentication is provided by Microsoft Accounts and Organisational Accounts (Azure Active Directory).

There is no ability to connect to SharePoint, nor are you given access to any underlying SQL databases.

I hope that helps!
Damian Brady

Is there a plan for a Pro Team Foundation Server 2015 book?

A lot has changed since 2013.

Your books are great, but it's been three years! :D

Hey wgf,

No plans that I know about. I suspect this series is wrapping up.

The difficulty is the VSTS team is on a ~3 week release cadence with TFS releases every ~3 months. Given it takes about 4 months to produce the book edition, it's not really feasible to keep ahead.

Thanks,
Damian Brady

That's unfortunate. I wonder how authors will manage to keep up?

I don't mind learning in bits and pieces online, but I would much rather buy a book that's 800+ pages and read that end to end. All my answers are in one place! :D