Release Management for Visual Studio 2013 (formerly known as inRelease client) is tightly integrated with Team Foundation Server (TFS 2010, TFS 2012 and TFS 2013 versions are supported. Visual Studio Online is not supported yet) To connect Release Management server to Team Foundation Server, you need to use Release Management Client for Visual Studio 2013:
- Launch Release Management Client for Visual Studio 2013. If you launch it for the first time, you will be prompted with Configure Services dialog window. Just enter Release Management server name and port number, and click on OK.
- Click Administration tab to connect Release Management server to TFS. Then, click on Manage TFS section.
- Click New button to add a TFS connection. You can add connections to many project collections hosted on different TFS servers or many separate project collections hosted on the same TFS server.
- Provide the following connection settings:
- name or the URL of TFS server
- name of the project collection
- service account credentials to connect to TFS
- HTTP/HTTPs protocol used to connect to TFS
- Click Verify to validate the settings provided.
- Click Save and Close to save the connection to TFS
That's all. Now you should be able to start using Release Management server with TFS. Oh, almost forgot, to configure connection to TFS, your account(s) must have the following minimal permissions
- Collection Level
- 'Make requests on behalf of others' permission (required to setup TFS Connection in release management server)
- 'View collection-level information' permission (to get list of Build Definitions on behalf of current user)
- 'View build resources' permission (to set a Build to Release)
- Team Project Level – for all projects used in release management
- 'View project-level information' permission (to add a TFS Group)
- Build Definition Level – for all build definitions used in release management server
- 'Retain Indefinitely' permission (when starting a Release)
To keep things simple, you can simply make service account used by release management server to connect to TFS a member of the Project Collection Service Accounts group.