Introduction

Over the last fifteen years, Microsoft's software development tooling has matured to address not only the needs of a lone programmer, but the needs of an entire software development team. This includes business analysts, project managers, architects, testers, programmers, managers, stakeholders, and even operations personnel who will deploy and maintain applications. This book was written to help teams understand and adopt these tools with the end goal of making them more cohesive, productive, and ultimately to produce higher-quality software on time and on budget.

Whether you already own Visual Studio 2012, or are considering purchasing it, this book will help you evaluate and adopt the right tools for your project. This book considers all of the roles which make up a modern software development project. The tools and technologies which are relevant to each role are examined in detail, including walkthroughs which will help you learn and apply each tool within your team.

Who Is This Book For

This book primarily targets teams of professionals in the field of commercial or enterprise software development — in other words, intermediate to advanced users. You are likely to find the book useful if you are any of the following:

• A developer, tester, or architect who wants to learn how the Visual Studio 2012 family of products can help you perform your job
• A project manager who must manage a software development project

This book is not designed for the absolute beginner. The focus is on practical application of the tools, code samples, and hands-on scenarios. The book's organization makes it easy to use as both a step-by-step guide and a reference for modeling, designing, testing, and coordinating enterprise solutions at every level.

Visual Studio 2012 is designed for software teams of all sizes. So, whether you have a team of 5 or 2,000 members, this book includes useful information for you related to Visual Studio 2012 and application lifecycle management. Unlike most Wrox books, this book targets all roles in the software development organization — architects, developers, testers, project leads, and management — not just developers.

What Does This Book Cover

This book includes a complete overview of the application lifecycle management capabilities of Visual Studio 2012. The book is divided into six main parts, based around the different aspects of application lifecycle management:

• Part I: Team Foundation Server
• Part II: Building the Right Software
• Part III: Project Management
• Part IV: Architecture
• Part V: Software Development
• Part VI: Testing

Part I: Team Foundation Server

Because Team Foundation Server is at the heart of Microsoft's application lifecycle management solution, this book starts with an examination of its capabilities. It discusses the architecture of Team Foundation Server 2012, and then delves into the version control system and some best practices surrounding branching and merging using Team Foundation Server. Finally, there is an in-depth look at the automated build process — Team Foundation Build — followed by some examples of common customizations you can make to Team Foundation Server.

Part II: Building the Right Software

Microsoft's application lifecycle management offerings in this release of Visual Studio 2012 have expanded to recognize the role that stakeholders play in the software development process. Stakeholders could be future end users of an application, the decision makers who are authorizing payment for an application, lawyers who need to approve applications for regulatory requirements, or any number of people external to the development team who have a vested interest in the outcome of a particular development project. In this section of the book, you find out about new tooling available to engage with stakeholders early and often throughout the development process. These tools can lead to higher-quality software that is more likely to meet expectations and deliver continuous value while minimizing the amount of rework required.

Part III: Project Management

This section of the book deals with the project and process management functionality of Visual Studio 2012 and Team Foundation Server 2012. This section examines the process templates that ship with the product, and it covers the new web-based Agile planning and tracking capabilities. Part III also discusses the reports that ship with Team Foundation Server. Whether you are practicing a lightweight development methodology such as Scrum, or a more formal, rigorous development process, you will discover that Team Foundation Server will provide you with the tooling you need to manage your projects.

Part IV: Architecture

This section of the book examines the tools available in Visual Studio 2012 for defining and analyzing application architecture. After a brief introduction to architecture concepts, the discussion dives into all the new UML tools available, including use case diagrams, activity diagrams, sequence diagrams, class diagrams, and component diagrams. You then learn about the Architecture Explorer and how you can use it to understand the architecture of your application. Finally, this section wraps up with a discussion of layer diagrams.

Part V: Software Development

This section of the book covers topics of most interest to a software developer using Visual Studio 2012. The topics selected for this section of the book are those that pertain most to building either complex applications or working with teams. For example, the section explains how unit testing, static code analysis, profiling, code coverage, and the new code clone analysis feature are ways to improve your application's overall quality and maintainability. Part V introduces the new built-in code review capability and how you can use it to collaborate with other developers. You find out how the ability to suspend and resume work in progress makes it easier to deal with interruptions. Finally, the section provides in-depth coverage of debugging applications with IntelliTrace, including a new way of using IntelliTrace for debugging applications in a production environment.

Part VI: Testing

Visual Studio 2012 has numerous tools available for testers to use. The examination starts with a look at the manual testing functionality available in Microsoft Test Manager, as well as the ability to automate user interface tests with coded user interface (UI) tests. Web performance testing and load testing enable you to create tests that can help you ensure that users of your website will experience the best possible performance, even under heavy load. The section concludes with a look the improved lab management capabilities of Visual Studio 2012, which enable you to make use of physical or virtual environments that you can use to automate build-deploy-test workflows.

Team Foundation Server Administrators

If you are the person on your team who is responsible for administering your Team Foundation Server deployment, you should consider purchasing this book as well as its sister book — Professional Team Foundation Server 2012 (Wrox, 2012. ISBN 978-1-118-31409-8) — which dives deeper into setup, configuration, and administration of Team Foundation Server 2012. You find out more about the possible deployment topologies you can choose from, how to make changes to process templates, advanced security settings, considerations for disaster recovery and geographically distributed teams, and much more.

Conventions

To help you get the most from the text and keep track of what's happening, we've used a number of conventions throughout the book.

As for styles in the text:

• We highlight new terms and important words when we introduce them.
• We show keyboard strokes like this: Ctrl+A.
• We show filenames, URLs, and code within the text like so: persistence.properties.
• We present code in two different ways:

We use a monofont type with no highlighting for most code examples.
We use boldface to emphasize code that is particularly important in the
present context.

Source Code

As you work through the examples in this book, you may choose either to type in all the code manually, or to use the source code files that accompany the book. All the source code used in this book is available for download at www.wrox.com. When you're at the site, simply locate the book's title (either by using the Search box, or by using one of the title lists) and click the Download Code link on the book's detail page to obtain all the source code for the book.

After you download the code, just decompress it with your favorite compression tool. Alternatively, you can go to the main Wrox code download page at www.wrox.com/dynamic/books/download.aspx to see the code available for this book and all other Wrox books.

Errata

We make every effort to ensure that there are no errors in the text or in the code. However, no one is perfect, and mistakes do occur. If you find an error in one of our books, such as a spelling mistake or a faulty piece of code, we would be very grateful for your feedback. By sending in errata, you may save another reader hours of frustration, and you will be helping us provide even higher quality information.

To find the errata page for this book, go to www.wrox.com and locate the title using the Search box or one of the title lists. Then, on the book details page, click the Book Errata link. On this page, you can view all errata that has been submitted for this book and posted by Wrox editors. A complete book list, including links to each book's errata, is also available at www.wrox.com/misc-pages/booklist.shtml.

If you don't spot “your” error on the Book Errata page, go to www.wrox.com/contact/techsupport.shtml and complete the form to alert us to the error you have found. We'll check the information and, if appropriate, post a message to the book's errata page and fix the problem in subsequent editions of the book.

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