Visual Studio Online offers a Team Foundation Server on the cloud. This is free up to 5 users, each additional user cost $10 per month. The free version includes:

• Complete integration with Visual Studio
• Private code repositories
• Backlog to track bug task, also Agile Processes
• Continuous Integration Builds

This features together with the free or paid versions of Visual Studio provides a great development environment. Visual Studio Online can also be used with Eclipse and XCode.

Let’s try this features with the development of my Chess Clock for Windows Store:

Visual Studio Integration
The integration of Visual Studio Online and Visual Studio is straight forward…

1. Register in Visual Studio Online
2. Create a team project online
3. Login with your account from Visual Studio
4. Create or Open a solution and add it to Source Control

This is the Visual Studio Online Home Page:

From this view it is possible to create the backlog items and bug entries, see the code, create test plans, configure continuous integration builds and download the generated binaries as a zip.

Code Repositories
Having the code online is great to forget about backups, also Visual Studio Online offers the same advantages that TFS: Change set history, Code comparison, associate code check-in with bugs of user histories, etc.

For my development I have configured a Main branch for development, and a Production folder with branches for each release.

Continuous Integration
At the moment I have configured only one build configuration: Main.ChessClock.CI. This build is in Release mode and triggered automatically after a code check-in on the Main branch.

References:
Visual Studio Online