TeamBuild in TFS 2010 is an incredibly powerful engine – it’s based on Windows Workflow 4 (WF4). Once you get over the initial learning curve of WF4, you can get your team builds to do some impressive stuff.

Data-driven unit tests are a great way to run lots of tests. You define a test harness (or method) and tie it to a spreadsheet in an Excel file to “drive” the test – each row in the spreadsheet is one iteration of the test case. I am not going to go into any more detail here – there are plenty of examples about how to set these up. Another advantage of using Excel for data-driven tests is that testers love Excel. They can open and edit the spreadsheet and add / edit / remove test cases at will.

Using “Data Dude” (or VS DB Professional) in VS 2010 allows you to bring Agile to your database development. You can import a database schema and add it to source control – so you get linking to work items as well as branching and labelling etc. Furthermore, you can use TeamBuild to build a .schema file, and then use vsdbcmd.exe to deploy schema changes (incrementally) to databases. You can also create unit tests and data generation plans.