Set Up Free Visual Studio Team Services Account And Invite Team To Collaborate

What is Visual Studio Team Services?

Visual Studio Team Services, previously known as Visual Studio Online, is a cloud-based service for collaborating on Project Planning using Agile tools, code development, Source code control and Testing.

Having DevOps helps the Team manage Continuous Integration along with Continuous Deployment and Monitoring. If you want to manage the cloud services; you can set up for free from here. If you want to host on your server, you can check the Team Foundation Server.

By having these administrations in the cloud, Microsoft has taken away the extra efforts to install Team Foundation Server on premises.

Since the VSTS is accessible in the cloud, an organization that has a team which is distributed across multiple locations, they can collaborate without having any additional cost of VPN and overheads of security.

Setup Visual Studio Team Services.

A user who has Microsoft account can join VSTS by simply entering the credentials, if you don't have then you can create and sign in the VSTS for free and add 4 more team members without any extra cost.

Step 1

Go to VSTS and click on free Account.

Step 2

Enter your Microsoft Credentials or Create a new one if you don't have, Shown as per below screen.

Step 3

Enter your Password and click on 'Next'.

Step 4

It will ask you to enter a name (host) for your team project. So like as shown in below screen I have entered name 'csharpcorner'

so it will be likecsharpcorner.visualstudio.com

Step 5

Click on 'Change Details' (Optional) button, to change default assignments.

Here you can see options like git or Team Foundation Version Control for managing your code. You can check my article on Version Control for the further read.

Here, we will select Git for now and enter ProjectName.

The project name is a logical container for all the entities related to the project that you are developing that has tasks, code, build definitions, rules of working together etc. It is given a name and here it is 'MSTeamProject'

Organizing Work Using, has 3 template selections like Agile Scrum and CMMI as per Project need you can select that, I will Explain that in my next Article in detail what are those templates, for now, we will select an Agile template (The default work tracking process is set to Agile.) and select any zone to host your project. Just enter a name and click on 'Continue'

Wait for the setup, and that's it you are ready to use VSTS in Cloud. We have our project 'MSTeamProject' Ready, so now we can invite others to join the project, add start collaborating the code, planning, and tracking using work items.

There is a big design of changes on the way so if you want to check you can click on 'Try it' button.

Step 6

To invite friends to join your team enter their email id and send an invitation, for that Choose the Settings icon, and then choose the Organization Settings option,

Step 7

Click on Add New Users

Enter UserId, Select Access Level, and add him to the Project 'MSTeamProject'

There are sets of groups having different permission, will explain in details for now select Project Contributor (Default) group.

Click on Add, That's it you can see the user details in the below list.

Hope you like this article, In my next Article, we will explore Project management Template, User Management, Role, and Permission in VSTS.

11 Comments

Join the conversation! Your thoughts help the community grow.

Juliana Bryant5y ago
Thanks for sharing such a wonderful post on Visual Studio Team Services setup. It helped us a lot to get it implemented in a most easiest way.
Bhavesh Jadav6y ago
Nice article.
Viknaraj Manogararajah8y ago
nice article..
Rushyanth Reddy8y ago
Nice Article.. Easy to Understand
- Ankur Mistry8y ago
  Thank you..Rushyanth Reddy
balakrishna maddhur8y ago
Wonderful article sir.I got lot of information from this article.Thanks for sharing sir.
- Ankur Mistry8y ago
  Thank you, I am Glad that it helps
Ibrahim Siddique8y ago
Nice Article. Thanks for sharing :-)
- Ankur Mistry8y ago
  Thanks Ibrahim, stay tuned for more on VSTS.
Guest User8y ago
Nice article
- Ankur Mistry8y ago
  Thank you Ragavi, stay tuned for more on VSTS.