Quick overview of TFS Preview

I spent last week playing with shiny/new Web technologies and I needed a place where I could store my todo list and keep my code. I could’ve used Git + Trello but I wanted to give TFS Preview a try so I created a project there, converted my todo list into user stories and connected my repo with my Azure account for automated deployments. After a week of using TFS Preview this is what I’ve learnt:

• It was very easy to configure automated deployments to Azure
• The performance of web portal ranged from acceptable to painfully slow.
• The UI is decent and it’s easy to execute all the basic tasks like add user story, add bug, look up a build
• Burndown chart worked out of the box
• Scrum board is simple and does the job
• Builds would take up to couple of minutes to start even if the build queue was empty
• Total build time was a bit unpredictable, ranged from 60s to 160s for the same code.
• Adding support for nUnit was more hassle than I anticipated
• Story boarding in PowerPoint is not integrated with TFS so you can’t push files directly from PowerPoint to TFS
• There is no Wiki
• Build log is as “useful” as it was in TFS 2010

All in all it is a decent start and I hope that Brian Harry’s team will keep deploying often so every week will welcome us with something new.

Update

You actually can specify how many builds you want to keep. For some reason when I clicked on the number of builds to preserve it didn't change from a label into a drop down list.