In case you missed Brian Harry’s announcement – we can now either link existing Visual Studio Online (VSO) instances OR we can create brand new VSO instances and control them through the Azure Portal. The problem before was that there had to be a 1:1 correspondence between VSO an a Microsoft Account. If you’re managing your own projects, that is likely not a problem. If however, you are in an enterprise, having a direct dependency on a Microsoft Account doesn’t work.
The good news is that today, we can associate VSO instances to an Azure Subscription.
Creating a new VSO instance is easy:
Note: if you want, an Azure Active Directory instance can be associated with your VSO instance.
And just like that, we have a new TFS instance courtesy of Visual Studio Online!!
No more having to spend unproductive time installing and configuring TFS from scratch. In a matter of minutes, we can stand up TFS with Visual Studio Online. From here, you can elect whether you want TFVC or git for your source code control. From there, it is very simple to connect your Azure Website to your new repository in order to publish from the source code repository. Like the on-prem version of TFS, you can choose your process template: CMMI, MSF Agile or Scrum. With VSO, you can also create build definitions. For more info on what VSO has to offer, check out this site. For a comparison of features between Visual Studio 2013 (On Prem) and Visual Studio Online – check out this resource.
