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Ars Staff - Dec 8, 2011 10:30 pm UTC

Team Foundation Service Preview, Microsoft's cloud-hosted beta version of its Team Foundation Server application lifecycle management, received its first major update today, offering improved performance, better notifications, a clearer user interface, and richer oversight of projects.

Team Foundation Service is built on Team Foundation Server (TFS) 11; the as-yet unreleased successor to TFS 2010. TFS 11 will be available as both traditional on-premises software and an online version hosted on Microsoft's Azure cloud platform. The online version has been available as an invitation-only preview since Microsoft's BUILD conference earlier in the year, and it's this online version that is being updated.

TFS is designed to handle most parts of the software development lifecycle; it includes a source repository/version control system, it handles bug reports and feature requests, it builds software and runs tests. With TFS 11, Microsoft is building in greater built-in support for agile methodologies (in particular scrum iterative development), integrated support for code reviews, and more.

There are third-party hosted versions of TFS 2010, and Microsoft uses TFS 2010 behind the scenes in its Codeplex open source project hosting service, but TFS 11 is the first version with first-party cloud hosting, and the first to see new fixes and updates rolled out to the cloud first. As the product matures, Microsoft will remove its invitation-only constraint, and later on remove the "preview" branding, at which point it will start charging customers that use the service. The company will also produce migration tools, to enable users to move both to and from the cloud-hosted version.

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