What’s new in Team Foundation Server 2013?

Whenever there's a new version of Visual Studio coming out (like 2013 just recently), it's usually the development tool that gets most of the screen pixels in the news. However, version control is indeed a necessary fundamental, and thus new features in TFS are always of great interest to me.

Now that TFS 2013 is out along with Visual Studio 2013, I wanted to quickly list the main new features that I see as the most important ones. Here goes:

• Enhanced web view. There've been numerous times when I've needed to access version control through the browser, without Visual Studio in hand.
• Undocking the Pending Changes window. In Visual Studio 2010 this worked, but not in Visual Studio 2012. Great to have this back in 2013 (although not strictly a TFS feature).
• Team rooms. A quick way to discuss ongoing topics and share thoughts.
• Backup and restore from the TFS console. How many SQL Server scripts have you written to support TFS backups before? Now you don't need to write them anymore.
• Cloud-based load testing. Test rig requirements just got a lot less heavy.

In addition to these, there's of course the support for Git that's been enhanced. Many people I talk to like Git, so it's great to have Git support built in into TFS.

For more information about the new features, check out MSDN.