TFSPreview is Dead - Long Live TFSPreview

At my day job, we have been using TFS (Team Foundation Server) for years.  It does a great job combining work items, process, and source control.  Of course the cost of it was a bit more than I could justify for use at home for all of my home projects.  My wife would have killed me.  One of my friends at Microsoft, Jim O'Neil, invited me to try out tfspreview.com as an Azure backed TFS service.  I instantly fell in love with it.  It gave me all of the features of TFS and it was offsite for protection and it was FREE.  the one thing that the site kept saying is that it would not be free forever and that at some time the service would open up for the public and go live.  Today is the day it went live.

The live service can be found at Team Foundation Service.  There are downloads so that it can hook into Eclipse and a command-line to use with xcode.  This provides developers of many different types of apps from iOS, to Android, to WP7/8, or any Windows apps.  VS2010 or VS2012 are needed to connect to this service.  Some good news is that the site also shows that the free VS2012 Express tools can also use the service.  I think this might be the first time that the Express SKUs could access TFS.  One concern I had was what were they going to have as a free subscription level and how much was the paid version.  So for free, Microsoft is offering:

Up to 5 users

Unlimited number of projects

Version control

Work item tracking

Agile planning tools

Feedback management

Build (still in preview)

If you need more than 5 users then in 2013 the paid plans will be announced.  But for us little guys, this is a great free service.  It definitely beats some of the other TFS hosting services by making this free.