Brian Harry has written a post referencing this other post: “How Visual Studio Online won me over in under 90 minutes“. It happens that I also adopted Visual Studio Online less than I week ago and I am thrilled about it since then. In the past I used and investigated source code providers (Perforce, Subversion, TFS, …) installed locally but I was looking for some solution to the repository backup/restore “annoyance” (after a failed restore that I suffered long time ago). While I already played with TFS Service some months ago, it was not until the past Wednesday when I gave it a serious chance. I uploaded a solution of one of my projects that is part of a bigger source folder and after realizing that it was better to make some adjustments in the folder structure before uploading last Friday I uploaded all my Visual Studio solutions. Since then I am enjoying it a lot because of the following new scenarios:

– I have a backup on the cloud each time that I check-in some file (instead of a making a backup by hand from time to time).

– I can use more than one computer at home (I have a tiny MacBook Air 11″ and a huge iMac 27″) to develop without copying code through USB drives or having a central “server”.

– I can use any device (such as a tablet or smartphone) with an internet connection to view the source code of the files, whenever I want.

– I can see and create/update work items from any device (instead of using Excel or the tasks of an Outlook .pst file as before). Or rather than using a separate application such as Trello.

Now I am playing with gated check-ins, code analysis execution, automated tests, etc.

Visual Studio Online has several plans, one of them (Basic) completely free for up to 5 users:
http://www.visualstudio.com/products/visual-studio-online-user-plans-vs

And some videos to get started are:

Getting Started with Source Control with Visual Studio Online
http://channel9.msdn.com/Shows/Visual-Studio-Toolbox/Getting-Started-with-Source-Control-with-Visual-Studio-Online

Getting Started with Visual Studio Online
http://channel9.msdn.com/Events/Build/2014/2-575

Welcome to Visual Studio Online
http://channel9.msdn.com/Series/Visual-Studio-Online