How does TFS 2015 work with Release Management

1
votes

Can anyone explain to me (or point me to a link) how TFS 2015 works with Release Management?

We have been using Release Management for about 6 months and recently started doing some research on TFS 2015. From what I understand, TFS 2015 V2 has integrated with RM.

Since my question is so broad, let me narrow it down to a few specific questions.

  1. Do I still need to manage my templates and release paths in the RM client or is there a way of managing them from the TFS web site? I have read about how to set up a release from TFS, but its always about scheduling and linking artifacts. It seems similar to setting up a CI build in Jenkins. The client works well for me, but I am under the impression that I wont need it anymore.

  2. Do I have to manually kick off an RM release from a TFS Release. When we use Jenkins, we have some post build steps that include starting an RM Release from command line. When I am setting up build tasks in TFS, I only see 2 options for deployment that arent relate to Azure: run command line or run a Powershell script. Do I need to kick off the RM release using a powershell or command line script, or is there a better way of telling TFS to kick off an RM release.

It is probably obvious that I am not clear on how TFS and RM integrate together, so feel free to chastise me and point me to some reading material. I have read the documentation on MSDN but even the screenshots in their docs dont look like my TFS interface, so maybe we didnt install it correctly?

1
tfsrelease-managementms-release-management

1 Answers

2
votes

The new Release hub in the TFS/VSTS web portal is a complete, ground-up rewrite of the Release experience. It has no relation to or integration with the old Release Management Server product. They are totally separate. The new Release hub is based on the idea of you writing your own deployment scripts in whatever manner works for you and using the Release hub to invoke the deployment scripts and track their progress through your environment pipeline.

You'll want to migrate off of Release Management Server, as it's no longer receiving feature updates, only bugfixes. For migration, you can use the ALM Rangers' migration utility (disclosure: I worked on this project).

For kicking off existing Release Management Server releases as part of your build process, I wrote some build tasks for the new TFS build system that you can grab on Github. They won't work in Jenkins, but you should be able to use them as a reference point. If you are using TFS build, you can import them using the TFS CLI.