Visual Studio Online First look..


Wondering what is Visual Studio Online!

By reading this post you can get at-least the basic idea of what is Visual Studio Online and How helpful it will be for Individual Developers and small Team with out investing much.

Visual Studio Online is a Cloud services for development teams to collaborate and manage software projects

With the recent actions from Microsoft I am personally happy that MS is going with the market trends(free cloud storage, Dot net Framework becomes open source and releasing VS Community Edition for free etc) and that will help MS as well as people depend on MS Products like me.

As a developer you might be knowing the features and benefits of Team Foundation Server (If not worth reading the MSDN link for TFS) and now assume if Microsoft provides the Cloud TFS Service for FREE!! Thats great to hear right..

You don't need to maintain the TFS Server backing up and other hurdles, every other thing will be taken care by the Visual Studio Online.

Even Git Repos are supported for Distributed approach.

Highlights of Visual Studio Online..
  • Set-Up
  • Code
  • Work
  • Build
  • Test
  • Deploy
  • Insights
  • Cross Platform
  • Integrate

Set-Up

Create an account with VS Online using your Microsoft Account (Hotmail, live etc.) and then sign in to your account. You may be seeing the home page some thing like this.

Code

After you create the account you need to Create a team Project to store your code. Post creating the team project connect it to Visual Studio. From your Visual Studio you can connect to your VS Online Team project (how cool it is :))

Once you configure your Team Project, you can add team members and you are good to go.. You can do your normal coding, Check in, Check out, Branching etc.. All your codes are safe in the cloud.

Work

 Once set up is complete you can create your application of your choice either it is web application or mobile apps or application of your choice in visual studio. At this point you need to select whether you need TFS or GIT. What is the difference and which one to select?

TFS - At any point of time all the team member will be getting the latest source code from the Repository and every one can Check Out and start adding the code and then after completing we can commit it. Other Team member will be getting the latest code from the repository. This is our tradition way.

GIT - Git is a Distributed Version Control. Where every user will have their own repository where they will check in and check out the codes. Once the Team member is comfortable to merge the code with the main Repo then he can Push and Pull the Changes. To know more about this approach  go to Github or Google it for Github approach.

The other advantage of this is we can create State holder View(the one who fund this Project) and this will help the stake holder to see where we are on the project.

Build

 One of the important stuff is to build and move the stuffs to deployment server. As a person responsible for 10 repositories and 10 different sites. I know how crucial is to configure it properly during the initial phase.



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