Just to correct, because it is NOT a zero friction tool
I agree with both of your views! TFS does indeed
introduce good management and the ability to report and
track changes. However the 1.0 product is incredibly
weak when dealing with offline. Which quite frankly
(besides being shocking) is a pain for remote workers.
It appears that MS approached the process side first and
the source control (and offline) was at the end when
they had a time crunch. TFS is a nice package that is
rolled up, but when coming from a pure source control
system that is designed for offline and concurrent edits
it does come across as less than adequate.
The other thing that I'm surprised it doesnt do (and
neither do a lot of other tools) is the lack of key
words support (aka VSS and other older tools). The MS
comment as I recall to this was something like "Seems
easy enough to right mouse button **shrug**". Again for
offsite users and when code to deployed to a customer
site (stored procedures, scripts, etc) you can no longer
tell what version they have without having to pull the
'code' in question and compare it.
Hopefully all of these will be covered in 2.0 :-),
although I wonder how much the upgrade will be!
Gareth: Actually, TFS has a very powerful offline
solution called a proxy server, which deals exactly with
the issues you mention. It's a source control cache that
sits at the remote site which makes things much faster
(and trasperant of course).
Not sure what you mean by keywords. Can you elaborate?
Roy.
First of all: I'm a huge fan of TFS ( beeing stuck with
SourceSafe for years who's not? :) ) and I'm on your
side of the case Roy. But I would agree with Gareth that
when it comes to offline usage TFS isn't that great. The
proxy server works well in a "offshore development
office" scenario but is the proxy really an option when
it comes to the "bring my laptop and work from home
scenario"? I guess that the solution for this is to open
up the TFS box for internet access using https. But all
the fanatic sysadmin/security guys will definitely make
you fight hard for that solution.
But offline usage will probably be better in V3.0...
Gareth is probably talking about the keyword expansion
feature that SourceSafe had.
Offline support or not I think that TFS rules, TFS realy
takes "Integrated Development Environment" to the next
level!!
Roy,
Offline for me means that I can work on it at the coffee
shop while waiting for a meeting, not working against
yet another server.
True, the "coffeeshop" scenario is not working amazingly
great at the momement. I won't even argue about that...
I totally agree with Oren that TFS has too much
"friction" atm - friction on the users (ie painful
offline, slow to commit, read-only bits), friction on
managers (no good web solution - although this is solved
now that MS have TeamPlain), friction on the bank
balance (for SMEs the current pricing is too high,
although at least this has been fixed for certified MS
partners).
That said, IMHO I have to agree that the collaborative
aspect of TFS as a whole is second to none. Although
even there it is possible (although painful to set up)
to get an equivalent setup using other tools (CC.NET,
Nunit, Subversion etc). Some of these, such as
subversion, have better integration for non-Visual
studio development which can be particularly important
if you are developing using 3rd party addins/tools.
As you say VSTS is a 1.0 product and as a developer who
has been using it for a year I have to say it shows.
The worst bit about it is MS don't seem interested in
listening to feedback. With an open source product you
can normally submit a bug/feature request and get
feedback pretty quickly but with Microsoft you get very
little. To me thats the most frustrating part, it just
doesn't feel like the product is improving.
It could be a good product but that won't happen if
Microsoft don't start to listen to the developer
community more.