Today we released the second update for TFS 2012 (TFS, TFS Express). You will find a detailed list of features in this blog post. You need to install the one that matches your installation – full or express. You do not need to uninstall TFS 2012 RTM or TFS 2012 Update 1. Installing TFS 2012.2 will take care of uninstalling your previous TFS 2012 installation and then installing the new version. You also do not need to detach collections or anything else special. As always, you should make a backup of your server prior to upgrade (you do make and test backups regularly, right?).

In this update, we preserve most of the configuration settings. This was a common complaint in the first update. We have a few more settings to preserve, most notably build machine settings, that we will address in the third update.

The one feature I want to highlight is the compatibility with TFS 2010 build agents/controllers. I mentioned this in a previous post. This is one of those features that’s incredibly valuable but isn’t obvious – you have to know about it.

This update process is completely new for the 2012 product cycle, and we learned a lot from our mistakes with the first update. Of course, our testing was even more thorough for this release.

The biggest change we made was getting more users trying early releases of it. We did this because we realized that some of the issues we had to patch for the first update were due just to the fact that customers exercise the product in different ways, and the combinations are nearly infinite. In a regular major version cycle, we have at least one public “go live” release that is crucial to flushing out bugs. We made CTP3 “go live” for our MVPs. We made CTP4 “go live” for everyone. That helped immensely. Every issue that was reported to us we investigated and fixed.

Enjoy!

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