Team Foundation server 2013 Update 2 RC is coming, are you ready?

While naked ALM Consulting can help you install and configure TFS you may want to take advantage of the upcoming TFS Upgrade Weekend from Microsoft for free.

Just as with the TFS 2013 Preview Microsoft is putting its money where its mouth is and setting up a raft of experts that will be on hand to help you upgrade to TFS 2013 Update 2 RC. They are so confident that you will not have any problems that on Friday 28th February and Saturday 1st March they will have experts standing by to support you. All they ask is that you register for the http://nkdalm.net/TFS13U2UpgradeWeekend so that they know how many folks are taking advantage… you know… just in case.

You have until 26th February to sign-up and if you are planning to upgrade there really is no reason not to take advantage of this offer…

In case you are asking yourself why you would want to update to Update 2 RC you may want to take a look at the list of new features:

• Query on Tags - At last we can now create queries against our tags
• Tags added to Visual Studio & Excel - Now it is not only the web that can update tags. If you are using Visual Studio or Excel you will also be able to access them.
• API for Tags - Tags we read only up until Update 2. We can now edit them from the existing API and from a new REST API
• Control Permissions on Tags - The TFS team has heard our shouts and has implemented a new permission with 2013 Update 2 that allows us to control who can manipulate tags.
• Non-working days - you can now control which days are excluded from the burndown in the web.
• Pining charts - the new 2013 charts can now be pinned to the homepage giving you much more flexibility over the presentation of the data.
• Export Test Plan to HTML - You can now export your test plan to HTML for offline reading/sharing, printing, etc. You can choose the level of detail you want to include in the document.
• Release Management Tags - Instead of targeting named machines in release management you can now target them via a tagging system. This should be the foundations of future improvements to simplify configuration
• Annotate for Git - The blame tool comes to Git

In addition the team has been working on a bunch of performance improvements for the backlog and other tools. There are many more features but these are the ones that I felt most relevant.