Looking for a good overview of Visual Studio 2010 and ALM?

Visual Studio 2010 provides many new features to aid Application Lifecycle Management. Learning its capabilities can be a bit daunting, especially if you are new to Team Foundation Server.

So enter the new book ‘Professional Application Lifecycle Management with Visual Studio 2010: with Team Foundation Server 2010’ by Mickey Gousset, Brian Keller, Ajoy Krishnamoorthy and Martin Woodward. This provides a great overview of all the the key features of Visual Studio and TFS 2010, presented with a view as to how TFS gives an end to end delivery of an ALM process.

Don’t go expecting this book will tell you everything about TFS, even at 600 pages it cannot be that detailed, it is a huge product, you think SharePoint is big, well it is just a subset of TFS! To address this potential problem the book contains many links of to relevant sources both on MSDN and blogs to fill in the extra detail you are bound to need concerning TFS and general development processes. Think of it as a “get you started” book, or a “what’s new in this release”, not a day to day administrators guide.

My one complaint, and it is very minor, is that it does read a bit like a collection articles as opposed to a single book. However, given it has four authors and the scope of the subject it covers this is forgivable.

So if you are are considering TFS 2010, whether as a developer, a sys-admin or manager this book will give you a good introduction into that you can achieve in your ALM process. Well worth a read.