Users of Team Foundation Server 2015 will see the release of its second release candidate (RC2) that is available for download now. Microsoft’s Brian Harry says that the code within RC2 is not 100% complete, but that it is very close to what will be shipping. He states that RC2 can be used in production environments and Microsoft will provide an upgrade path to the RTM code if you install RC2 in that situation.
Harry says that 2015 represents some of the largest changes made to TFS in quite some time, and his team has been working to mitigate any upgrade issues identified in their internal upgrade tests. In fact, the reason his team is releasing RC2 is that he feels too many bugs remain in the product from an upgrade standpoint—once installed TFS is stable but there have been some cases identified where there is not yet completely successful upgrade.
This means that while users can upgrade from RC2 to RTM when it is available, they should not do so in a mission critical environment unless they have proper backups and the time to use them if errors result. Something else that is not supported is running RC2 on the same machine that has VS2015 RC installed due to conflicts in file versioning between the two programs. This scenario would affect users that wish to have TFS, VS2015, and their build agents all on the same environment. Microsoft’s Allen Clark notes that if TFS2015 RC2 is needed immediately, a workaround would be to install it on a machine that only has VS2013. For more information, consult the full release notes for RC2.
Released separately is the RTM version of Team Explorer Everywhere 2015. This package includes an Eclipse plugin and a command line client for TFS2010-2015 and Visual Studio Online. The command line client supports a multitude of platforms including Windows, Linux, Mac OS X, Solaris, AIX, and HP-UX.
