Quake3World

Does anyone here have experience with Microsoft Team Foundation Server? The company I work at currently works with Visual Sourcesafe and needless to say, it's hell. I've recently started working at this company and I come from a Subversion background from my previous company when it comes to source control.

Subversion was deliciously easy to work with there and stepping over to VSS is quite a bitter step back for me. Unfortunately, most of the people that work here don't know any better and are completely oblivious to how backwards VSS actually is.

There is, however, light at the end of the tunnel. At least, I hope so. Someone is looking into a viable alternative for Sourcesafe. While he has unfortunately turned down Subversion already (for all the wrong reasons tbh), there is an option my company will switch to Team Foundation Server.

Now I'm looking for information about how that works source-control wise (that's the bit of TFS my company is most interested in as far as I know). I just want to know if I should put my foot down on the brakes hard before my company tumbles into a €10,000 investment in a system that could just as well be replaced by something that is free (such as Subversion)

Anyone that has experience with both SVN and TFS that could tell me where they differ and where they are similar?

It's not that bad, actually. I suppose you are going to use it as part of Visual Studio Team System? If you've ever worked with SVN + JIRA + Confluence or Telelogic Synergy (well, IBM Synergy now), you'll feel right at home.

The one thing that always made we want to strangle the VSS developers with their own intestines, was the god-awful brain dead conflict resolution (that, and how ridiculously easy it was to corrupt the repository). TFS is much, much better in that regard.

Your manager will love it, too, because you can create all kinds of silly reports, with bar charts, and labels and all that jazz.

The downside is that, yes, it's pretty expensive and it doesn't have any unique selling points that I'm aware of. But hey, it isn't your money they are throwing away, right?

Thx for the reply. We used to use SVN and JIRA at my previous company. I'm not familiar with Confluence or IBM Synergy at all.

The brilliant thing with VSS here is that we have the "best" conflict resolution possible: avoid conflicts by making files check outs exclusive to a single user (so if my colleague has a file checked out, I can't touch it). I assume that this is no standard configuration for VSS, as it really hinders my productivity.

I don't care about the money being spend at TFS, it's just that if it's another shite product, then I'd have the "free" tag of SVN as extra leverage to introduce that

Confluence is branded as an enterprise knowledge management system, which is marketing speak for wiki. But a nice wiki, I'll give it that.

The exclusive-lock thing is actually standard in VSS (makes you wonder who ever came up with such default settings), and yeah, it's a real productivity killer. Especially when half of your team works from an office in another city. The amount of phone calls I've made to get people to check their stuff in... fortunately, it can be changed to optimistic locking.

With regards to conflict resolution, I was referring to the horror that ensues when you start to branch and merge is in VSS. It's really, really awful. And I only use 'awful' for lack of a better word.

And now the point I was going to make before I digressed: SVN is only a source control system, while TFS is also a wiki and does reporting. You might want to look into Trac (the venerable old man of project management systems), Redmine or Mantis. The latter is more a bug tracker than a full-blown project management system, but it has a lower barrier to entry (i.e. easy to use for managers and marketing people and the likes).

^misantropia^ wrote:Confluence is branded as an enterprise knowledge management system, which is marketing speak for wiki. But a nice wiki, I'll give it that.

A nice wiki eh? That would be a first

^misantropia^ wrote: The exclusive-lock thing is actually standard in VSS (makes you wonder who ever came up with such default settings), and yeah, it's a real productivity killer. Especially when half of your team works from an office in another city. The amount of phone calls I've made to get people to check their stuff in... fortunately, it can be changed to optimistic locking.

Damn, that'd be really annoying. I already find it annoying if I have to kick the guy that's sitting across of me to check his stuff in. I'm not sure which response I'd rather hear anymore, when the options are "I'm still busy with that file" or "oops sorry forgot to check it back in... again".

^misantropia^ wrote: With regards to conflict resolution, I was referring to the horror that ensues when you start to branch and merge is in VSS. It's really, really awful. And I only use 'awful' for lack of a better word.

Oh, that's also no problem here: there are no branches whatsoever. In fact, we're about to go into a beta period for a new version of our product. While major beta releases should introduce new functionality and minor beta releases are for critical bug fixes, without branching, our venerable team captain has decided that if such a conflict arises, new functionality for an upcoming major release will have to be released to a minor version if a bugfix is done in code that's changed for the upcoming major release. Sigh. That's just begging for problems.

^misantropia^ wrote: And now the point I was going to make before I digressed: SVN is only a source control system, while TFS is also a wiki and does reporting. You might want to look into Trac (the venerable old man of project management systems), Redmine or Mantis. The latter is more a bug tracker than a full-blown project management system, but it has a lower barrier to entry (i.e. easy to use for managers and marketing people and the likes).

I'm familiar with the fact that TFS is much more than just version control. That's what's a bit worrying to me as well, as AFAIk the guy doing research into this was looking for a new source control system, not a management tool.
I'm familiar with Mantis by the way. Had to hack it here and there to change or add some functionality for my previous company. As a tool, I hated it to be honest and most managers were moaning about not being able to get proper reports out of it. Must admit we used a pretty old version though, so things may have improved in the meantime.

I forgot to mention http://unfuddle.com/ if you want svn or git + project management and not worry about hosting it yourself, making backups, etc. We use it at NRC Handelsblad and it's pretty cool.

Yeah I made an account for that a week or two ago for personal programming stuff. It's really neat.

Cool link, thanks. Eventually I would like to rent a virtual dedicated server and load subversion, among other things, but unfuddle should do nicely until then.