Professional Team Foundation Server

1.7. Migrating and Integrating Your Existing Tools and Assets

When you look at how you can work within Team System, you have to consider whether it makes more sense to migrate or integrate your existing tools into Team System. Migration makes a lot of sense if you want to rid yourself of expensive third-party licensing agreements. For example, Team System provides the ability to do large-scale load tests and obviates the necessity of paying thousands of dollars to support and license a third-party tool.

Integration is a smart option if you have invested a lot of money on existing tools and you wish to leverage that investment. Integration is a little trickier because it often entails extra configuration and programming steps to make both systems "talk" to and integrate with each other. Let's take NUnit as an example of a tool that is very popular and does not have a great integration story with Team Foundation Server. Sure, you can migrate your NUnit code over to the Unit Test Framework within Team System using the migration tool. But if you want true integration with NUnit, you would have to create tools using Team Foundation Server's extensibility hook, which would perform the translation back and forth and allow Team Foundation Server to "understand" the code in build verification tests, during checkins, and so forth.

In this section, we will look at the core features of Team Foundation Server and discuss the challenges and resources available to help you migrate and integrate ...