Brian Harry has just published a new post detailing the future “Orcas” release of Team Foundation Server. The post is fairly detailed and he attempts to point out what features are new as well as what will be in the Beta 1 release vs. the Beta 2 release.
The features marked as new include:
- TFS Best Practices Analyzer – A tool that can be run against your TFS server that will help diagnose configuration errors and tuning possibilities.
- VSTS Web Access – There’s been much written about this already but the new Web Access product from devBiz will be released as a Power Tool in the next 60-90 days.
- Support for MOSS 2007.
- Official testing and support for more configurations – This includes clustering, mirroring, log shipping, Virtual machine deployment, and more.
- Scheduled builds – You can schedule builds to happen at specified times.
- Improved build agent communication – We replaced .NET binary remoting with WCF web services, simplifying some configuration and security aspects.
- Ability to run GUI tests as part of a build – Automated builds used to run tests in such a way as to prevent access to a GUI desktop.
- New checkin policy for broken CI builds – Preventing checkin while the CI build is broken.
- Offine improvements (Beta 2) – We’ve signficantly improved the experience going offline and integrated the tfpt online capability into the IDE for going back online.
- Extranet support for the TFS Proxy – allowing you to access a local TFS proxy with a different set of credentials than the TFS server.
- Command line help – You can now type “tf command /help” and get a console dump of the usage of that command. This is much more convenient than always being launched into the richer GUI hypertext help when you just want to remember what the options for a command are. You can still launch the GUI help by running “tf msdn”. You can get a console dump of available commands by just typing “tf help”.
- Source Control Explorer refresh improvements – This includes less redrawing and reloading but even more important it enables updates based on changes made in other instances of TeamExploror or the command line. That’s right, if you checkout a file from the command line, any instances of TeamExplorer you have running on the same machine will automatically refresh.
- Query builder usability improvements – Drop down filtering based on current project, better MRU lists, column drag & drop, shift-click mouse based multi-column sorting, etc.
- Attachments improvements – Save button, drag & drop for adding an attachment, multi-select for attaching files.
- Tooltips on field names contain the field name used for querying.
- Server side support for deleting work items & work item types (Beta 2) – We didn’t have time to do client UI support for it but we plan to release a Power Tool that will take advantage of the new server side feature.
The above list is only what has been flagged as “new” (some of which won’t be available until beta 2). See Brian’s original post for a complete list of all features.