Visual Studio Online is a platform of services that are now making available to development teams. It is platform helps you to plan, build, deploy and manage applications using a comprehensive suite of services. Visual Studio Online is not just TFS(Team Foundation Services), it is a set of other services on top of TFS hosted by Microsoft. It is really easy to setup go to this page.
You can plan your application and release in different ways, You can also develop and test your applications with VS Online. Cloud load testing service and test case management is available for your team.It also helps you out with release process for example automated builds which ultimately deploying to windows azure.
Key new services that are added in VS online are Cloud load testing, Lightweight browser based code editor, Automated builds and Application Insights. The code editor looks as below
It helps you to do the quick edits and complementary to Visual Studio IDE. In this release it allows you to compile Windows Azure websites. It is just a lightweight code editor. Load testing is now simplified and you do not need expensive infrastructure to test your application.
Basically, what will happen is you will connected to VS Online and you will get set of free resources and you pay for those you use for testing. The next service is auto-build where VS Online has the build-farm to build images, basically you queue a build and VS Online setup a server for you to start the build. As soon as the build is complete VS online kills the server.
Another important service from VS Online is Application Insights. Application Insights is going to help you with three main questions that you have about your application. Is it available? Is it performing well? How to make data driven investment decisions based on the usage data? This service collects the Telemetry from all parts of your applications. Applications can client based, Web sites or web services and databases. It gives you the 360 view of your application.
The following are the options which you can try to get using the VS Online.
