Update: Microsoft have dropped the “11″ naming in favour of 2012, so the next version of Team Foundation Server will be TFS 2012. Likewise for Visual Studio 11 / Visual Studio 2012.

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Not one to let the grass grow underfoot, Microsoft has released a Developer Preview of Team Foundation Server 11 so early adopters and inquisitive minds can have a play with the new features.

Team Foundation Server 11 ties in with the forthcoming update to Visual Studio (oddly enough, it’s called Visual Studio 11), and .NET Framework 4.5

The ALM mantra is strong with TFS 11, and Brian Keller of Microsoft’s TFS team has published a virtual machine with a number of labs to demo its Application Lifecycle Management capabilities.

These include:

• Agile Project Management in Team Foundation Server 11
• Building the Right Software – Generating Storyboards and Collecting Stakeholder Feedback with Visual Studio 11
• Diagnosing Issues in Production with IntelliTrace and Visual Studio 11
• Exploratory Testing and Other Enhancements in Microsoft Test Manager 11
• Making Developers More Productive with Team Foundation Server 11
• Unit Testing with Visual Studio 11 – MSTest, NUnit, xUnit.net, and Code Clone

It’s worth pointing out the Virtual Machine is a bit of a beast; the build is made up of:

• Microsoft Windows Server 2008 R2 Standard Edition
• Microsoft SQL Server 2008 R2
• Microsoft Visual Studio 11 Ultimate Developer Preview
• Microsoft Team Foundation Server 11 Developer Preview
• Microsoft SharePoint Foundation 2010
• Microsoft Project 2010
• Microsoft Office Professional 2010 (Word, PowerPoint, Excel)

…So your test rig had better have plenty of resources to spare, not to mention be running Windows Server 2008 R2 or Windows 8, and have onboard Hyper-V compatible hardware virtualisation, and a fully charged flux capacitor.

Scribbled by Ian