Checking my work items from the airport.

Well, its Sunday evening and I am at Melbourne Airport about to hop on a plane to Adelaide. Since I’ve got half an hour before my flight boards I though I would take a quick look at the work items that are assigned to me in the TFS Now team project.

As part of our internal dog-fooding of TFS Now we decided to migrate a number of our internal DevCentre projects into the hosted solution. The TFS Now code base itself was actually part of that migration and that means that when I look at my work items here at the airport, I am actually connecting across the Internet to our own dedicated TFS server just like our customers will.

Mobility for development team members (project managers, testers, and developers) is actually one of the big benefits that we think TFS Now provides to customers. It is certainly very important for the TFS Now team because we are split between Melbourne, Sydney, Adelaide and Canberra.

Anyway – I need to triage my work items so I better hit publish on this blog post.

Announcing TFS Now, a hosted TFS service!

Do you want Team Foundation Server hosting? So did I, but when I looked around there was none to be found and at Readify we thought that it was such obvious service to provide to the .NET development community that we started taking steps to make it happen.

More than eight months later I am excited to announce publicly that on the 8th of August 2007 will officially launch its TFS hosting service to be known as TFS Now.

One of the things that excites me about TFS Now is that from a TFS users perspective it is actually the first commercial offering where I am not restricted to a certain set of license agreements and where I have access to the full capabilities of Team Foundation Server:

• Work Item Tracking
• Reporting Services
• Version Control
• Team Build Servers

We hope that those in the .NET community that haven’t been able to roll out TFS for various logistical reasons will look favorably upon this service. Over the coming days, weeks, months (years?) we will post this blog regularly about the directions that TFS Now is taking, but also about general happenings in the .NET developer and VSTS/TFS user communities.

If you are interested in using TFS Now in your organization or you have some questions you would like answered, please feel free to e-mail me, or if appropriate leave a comment on this blog.