Best practices to organize distributed team work (Azure+TFS+VS)

Question

I wish to join another developer to my project. To maintain code versioning we're going to use Team Foundation Service. But I see some other colaboration issues:

a) Today my dev dabase is on localhost and production is on sql azure. I assume I will have to move dev DB also to azure and allow full access to the second developer. We're using dynamic IP's, so every time I want to connect to azure DB i have to enable my IP in azure firewall. Does he need to be sql azure server admin to enable his IP every time?

b) Is it possible to allow him access to publish azure package to staging instance and restrict possibility to swap production only to me? As far as I know, the TFS can be connected to azure service to automate building and publishing. But I cannot find any articles about access restrictions.

c) Are there any materials/books that describe best practices how team should organize it's work using Visual Studio 2010/12, TFS and Azure?

Answer 1

Microsoft released a preview on TFS as service in cloud. You can find the reference material here

You can find the documenation on continous deliver with TFS here.

It helps you to automate your cloud service deployments and development very asily. You will be able to achieve what you want with this, all you need is a Visual studio client for this.

Hope it helps you.

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Answer 2

@Kumar,

Those materials helps organizing deployment. Thank you. But I still don't know how to organize things described in question A. What's your expirience?

Answer 3

For the question restricting permissions for swapping VIPs etc.. as per my knowledge it is not possible today.

Can you please let me know what is that you want to organize at things level. Are you talking about creating tasks etc...?

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Answer 4

a) Does he need to be sql azure server admin to enable his IP every time?

You need to grant co-admin privileges to the Azure Subscrition, to your devs. They will then be able to set the SQL Azure firewall rules by themselves, using the Azure Management Portal.

Hope this helps!

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Cheers, Carlos Sardo

Answer 5

@Carlos - I need other solution. Subscription co-admin gives too much access to people who just need to access developers database. I see only two options so far:

- connect developers to the Dev-DB through VPN so they will be seen as one IP

- migrate Dev-DB to local sql express instances on every developer's machine

Answer 6

Hi,

How about managing Windows Azure SQL Database Servers Using Windows PowerShell? It makes use of the Windows Azure SQL Database Management API and it enables you to perform Operations on Server-Level Firewall Rules.

This operation should do the trick:

Creating Server-Level Firewall Rules for Servers with IP Detect

The Set Server Firewall Rule with IP Detect operation adds a new server-level firewall rule or updates an existing server-level firewall rule for a SQL Database server with requester’s IP address. This is useful when a user does not know his/her external IP address due to address translation, proxy servers, etc. For information on creating a server-level firewall with an IP Address range, see Creating Server-Level Firewall Rules.

I found this article where it describes this procedure/trick: Update Azure DB Firewall Rules with PowerShell

Hope this helps!

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Best Regards,
Carlos Sardo