After almost four decades of intensive fundamental research and development activities intermetallic titanium aluminides have found application in aircraft and automotive engines. The advantage of this class of innovative high-temperature materials is their low density in combination with good strength and creep properties up to 800°C. A drawback, however, is their limited ductility at room temperature, which is reflected in a low plastic fracture strain. Advanced engineering TiAl alloys are complex multi-phase materials which can be processed by ingot or powder metallurgy, precision casting methods as well as additive manufacturing, e.g. electron beam melting. Each production process leads to specific microstructures which can be altered and optimized by thermo-mechanical processing and/or subsequent heat-treatments. The aim of these heat-treatments is to provide a microstructure with balanced mechanical properties, i.e. sufficient ductility at room temperature as well as creep strength at elevated temperature. In order to achieve this goal, the knowledge of the occurring solid state phase transformations including order/disorder reactions is essential. Therefore, thermodynamic calculations were conducted at first to predict the phase diagram of engineering TiAl alloys. After experimental verification, these phase diagrams provided the basis for the development of the heat-treatments mentioned above. To account the influence of deformation and kinetic aspects sophisticated ex-and in-situ methods have been employed to investigate the evolution of the microstructure during thermo-mechanical processing and subsequent heat-treatments. For example, in-situ high-energy Xray diffraction was conducted to study dynamic recovery and recrystallization processes during hot-deformation tests. Summarizing all results a consistent picture regarding processing and mechanical properties of advanced engineering TiAl alloys can be given.