What's New in TFS 2008

I just completed my presentation on the new features of TFS 2008 at this year's Tulsa TechFest.  It was a relatively small session held in one of the classrooms here at the OSU campus which allowed me to more easily address questions during the presentation.  The topic I presented on is called What's New in TFS 2008.  Although the presentations run roughly 75 minutes, I had to skip over a couple of my demos because there are so many new features in TFS 2008.  It was easy to tell that I'm not the only one excited about some of the new features :-)  If I had to pick my top 5 features in TFS, they would have to be:

1. Continuous Integration - although there are 3rd party/open source implementations available for TFS 2005 now, they don't have the same, clean integration that's present in TFS 2008.
2. Build Retention Policies - finally, I won't have to worry about running out of space on the "drop" server because there are 2,000 old builds sitting around collecting dust.  Anyone that's ever had a build fail due to lack of disk space (which is not stated in the build failure log) will appreciate (or, love) this feature!
3. Better Build Support - specifically, the ability to store the TFSBuild.proj file in any folder.  This greatly enhances branching options.
4. Queued Builds - the ability to queue builds is great.  I know longer have to wait for my CI build to complete before I can start the test build that pushes the updates to the test machines.
5. Performance Improvements - there are tons of other enhancements and improvements throughout TFS 2008 but there are also a lot of performance improvements as well.  Anything that allows my builds to complete a little bit sooner is much welcomed.

I could probably list a couple dozen other features that I really like in addition to those above but I have to stop somewhere :-)

You can download the slides here if you're interested:

• PowerPoint 2007 Format
• PDF Format