PART 4

Building (Developer Practices)

Visual Studio 2012 and Team Foundation Server 2012 are all about development and making system development easier and more effective. Part IV takes us down the developer’s road and lets us have a look at what tools we can use to accomplish this.

We start our stroll by looking at the Team Foundation Server 2012 version control system. Having a good, robust, and reliable version control system is essential to the success of any development project. We also look at how we can manage our source code by looking at some branching strategies.

Test Driven Development (TDD) is an agile practice that has spread far beyond the agile world. In essence, it makes the developer write test code to verify the application logic throughout development. These tests are called Unit Tests – automatic tests that operate very close to the business logic. Their focus is to test individual rules in isolation to certify that the intended result is achieved and maintained over the lifetime of an application. Using these practices we can raise our code quality quite a bit.

As developers we want to create code of the highest possible quality. That often means a slower development pace because we need to go through more checks on our code. But does it really need to be a slow and burdensome process? Chapter 17 examines several powerful tools Visual Studio 2012 offers that we can use to get control of our code quality.

Performance analysis and tuning are often done only after software is released—but we do not have to wait until then. Instead, we should integrate profiling into our daily routines to make sure we always keep an eye on the performance of our applications. Visual Studio 2012 can help us implement good performance analysis both during development and after release.