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Closed 10 years ago.
I've just joined a new company and at the moment we're using Microsoft SourceSafe as our repository. The settings aren't ideal and it's proving to be a big pain in the neck.
I've recently used Mercurial and thought it was amazing, so I'm advocating switching to that, but it looks like the company already has a Team Foundation Server licence and wants to use that instead.
Can anyone give me a list of points where one is better than the other? I've not used TFS and so I don't know what it's good/bad at.
You cannot directly compare TFS and a DVCS.
If your company leans toward TFS, that may be because of the other features TFS comes with (data collection, reporting, and project tracking, all well integrated with Microsoft products)
On the pure Version-Control side, the Team Foundation Server 2010, with its Team Foundation Version Control (TFVC) 2010, introduces branches as first-class citizen.
See Team Foundation Server and branching characteristics, compared to others.
I still find their branching models more complex than a Mercurial or Git one.
See TFS2010 Branching into a subfolder of another branch vs. Guide to Branching Model in Mercurial (and this SO question which also details merges and branches with DVCS)
That being said, it remains a CVCS (Centralized VCS), meaning you get different working processes than with a DVCS: see Describe your workflow of using version control (VCS or DVCS).
The true killer feature of a DVCS remains its merge capability (simpler and faster than any CVCS).
But introducing a DVCS in a corporate environment remains hard.
I recommend Joel on Software http://hginit.com for a list of very good reasons to switch to distributed version control.
I have found a few gotchas with TFS that make it a little different than other CVCS.
TFS is very difficult to use outside of Visual Studio. Even diffing versions is done inside VS. Personally I only like to use VS for writing code.
We have had lots of issues with dll's and other binary files not updating to the latest version.
TFS makes all your files under version control read-only. This makes modifying files outside of VS very painful. In fact, this is still causing issues with out Silverlight projects in our Continuous Integration build in TFS.
The command line tool for TFS is not easy to use from the command line. (Personally, I like to use the command line)
Background:
My company switched from SVN and TFS and I use Mercurial/Git for my side projects. I also followed this blog about using Mercurial with TFS and it has made my work with TFS much more enjoyable.
TFS is an Application Lifecylce Management Tool not ONLY a source code repository / versioning system.
It's strength's are:
-It's natural integration into Visual Studio (+100)
-It's Full App Lifecycle support from Work Item through Q/A acceptance.
-It's integration with MS Project / Sharepoint, and all the other
hoo-ha's you get
-And now TFS 2012 has added support for "Local Workspaces" which allows
for off-line working, but also allows "Server Workspaces" which is
similiar to TFS 2010.
-Diff on every Check-in / Commit
The Source control side of it is also very strong, however, personally, as long as I can see the entire history, not lose code, and not have my code "stepped on". I could give a darn.
I've been using TFS since 2008 and the latest round of improvement further demonstrates Microsofts commitments to evolving their products and keeping up with industry changes. Personally I love it, but i stay in the Microsoft environment (which i also love).. outside of that, it may not work with everyone's needs.
Now, a few days into working with Mercurial professionally (BitBucket / Mercurial / tortoiseHG / VisualHG ) , i have to say the tools seem a bit dated. The integration with Visual Studio is like luke warm coffee (ho-hum), and the explorer integration takes me back to "the good ol days" when i was lucky to NOT be working on Visual Source Safe.
Another thing to take note of is the ease in migrating from Visual Source Safe into TFS, it's fairly painless.. i recently moved my last companies entire history in VSS into TFS and it just took a couple command line utils and overnight to get all the change history moved over. I was shocked (as where my colleagues) at how easy the migration was, it even kept all the history since the beginning (by request of the powers that be)
I'm definitely biased having worked with MS tools for a long time, but there's not much to source control as long as it works..
If your organization wants to truly manage all aspects of application development, and they haven't got integrated tools or processes yet, TFS will afford them the ability to grow and manage from the get go.
Start with Source Control, end up with specs originated in MS Project, tied to work items tied to Unit Test tied to acceptance tests tied to automated builds and deployments
And Lastly: Burn Down / Velocity Charts
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Closed 10 years ago.
We are currently looking for a version control system to use in our projects. Currently our team is less than 10 people. We have been using VSS for the last 5 years. I have never worked with SVN and other version control systems.
Up to now we have been using VSS, but nowadays more powerful source control systems exists like TFS, SVN, etc. We are planning to migrate our projects to Visual Studio 2010, so the first idea coming to mind is to start using TFS 2010.
My question is: how good is TFS compared to other source control systems? Is it a good idea using it, or should we rather use SVN (or any other system)?
Having worked with TFS, Git, Subversion, CVS and VSS, let me quickly summarize my experience:
It's fair to say that both Visual SourceSafe (VSS) and Concurrent Versions System (CVS) are pretty much obsolete these days.
Git is technically the most powerful tool, but requires some time to understand the concepts. It also plays most of its advantages only if you really go for a distributed scm approach. The number of third-party software supporting Git is increasing rapidly, but is not yet as ubiquitous as for SVN.
Subversion (SVN) offers clean and easy-to-understand concepts with a fairly common-sense and generic approach. A vast amount of integration software for most IDEs and file managers, as well as a lot of extension software is available. Because of the use of standard protocols like HTTP and WebDAV, it also integrates with software that wasn't actually designed to work with SVN, such as Microsoft Office ("Windows Web Folders") and more. SVN would be my recommendation if you are planning for a more traditional, centralized SCM approach.
TFS version control is tightly integrated with Microsofts "Visual Studio" product line and the rest of the TFS development lifecycle platform. For use outside Visual Studio, there are a number of tools and a command line interface, but it really doesn't make sense to use TFS without Visual Studio, believe me. TFS version control is technically one of the worst I've ever worked with. Reasons:
It needs explicit checkout of every single file you work with. The same file being checked out by more than one person at the same time means TFS sees a conflict, no matter whether these people actually changed anything.
TFS uses a "workspace" concept, where actions in your working copy are recorded on the server as you work. You can't just checkout multiple copies of the source tree to multiple folders, you need constant online connection to the server (there is an "offline" mode, but that messes things up). All changes to anything in the local working copy have to go through TFS client tools first, since files are downloaded as read-only.
The fact that TFS shows more conflicts in the UI than are actually there encourages users to just bulk-accept or bulk-reject changes, which leads to loss of changes in one way or the other. It thus obstructs your view to what is actually important, which is a dangerous thing for a version control system.
The UI integration in VS doesn't support many useful operations you need when working with a SCM system seriously, like atomic (server-only) creation of branches, Branching from earlier revisions, undeletion, reverting of changes of a given changeset, and many more.
It is horribly slow, because creation of a branch implies downloading a whole new copy of the source tree if done via the VS GUI. A simple rename of a folder is also really slow. All in all it seems to create a lot of network traffic for simple operations.
The built in "shelving" feature, where you can save away your current changes without checking them in, is a nice idea but very much useless in most scenarios, since it doesn't support conflict resolution or merging when you re-apply your shelved changes to your working copy. If creating branches was as simple, reliable, fast, and straightforward as e.g. in SVN, you wouldn't really need such a feature, since every developer could create their own branches to manage this requirement.
In our environment, a number of bugs have turned up in TFS version control where files that had actually been changed where not recorded as such, and in few cases files were reverted to an earlier version without notice. This really shouldn't happen in a version control system!
Team Foundation Server is a full Application Lifecycle Management suite. If you have a Professional, Premium, or Ultimate version of Visual Studio 2010 with an MSDN subscription, Team Foundation Server 2010 is now free. All of your Visual Studio users that fall under that classification, as well, and do not require an additional CAL. Other users, however, will require that you purchase CALs to stay compliant with the license.
Using Team Foundation Server 2010, you will get source control, process management, defect tracking, build services, reporting, project portals, and more. SVN is strictly source control. I have used both, and they are different beasts. It would be fair to say that the type of features offered by SVN are a subset of Team Foundation Server, on the whole. While there are third party connectors to make it easier to work with SVN inside of Visual Studio (free, I believe - as well), the native integration between Visual Studio and Team Foundation Server is fairly seamless. From an administrative standpoint, both on the server and project level, you have an excellent balance of ease of use and features.
For the last three years, or so - between two different employers - I have setup and installed Team Foundation Server and maintained it over its lifetime. Both companies have used it to their advantage to be able to bring ordered process to their SDLC. The MSF Agile v5 template, if you are an Agile/Scrum shop, is outstanding. Sprint planning and management has never been as easy with any tool as it is now.
Edit - Added information about small teams:
I noticed a comment to the question regarding small teams. Team Foundation Server 2010, given its price point, makes sense for small teams now, as well. I would not have recommended it with Team Foundation Server 2008, though. With the latest version, there is a very nice "Basic" configuration that provides a lightweight installation, sans reporting and portal functionality. You can also install it locally, as well, if you are a "one man shop" with this configuration (Microsoft actually lists it as an acceptable configuration for a client install.) I have it on my laptop for my POC work - having set up a nightly maintenance plan and moving my backup to Dropbox. Works very well for peace of mind. ;-)
Martin Fowler has an interesting post about this topic on his website.
We are a small Microsoft shop with 4 developers. We like the idea to have everything integrated and under the same SQL database but not to deal with too many features or a complexity we don't need.
The other option would be to use two distinct third party tools. We also wonder if VS2010 version control and bug/issue tracking capabilities are comparable with the best third party tools on the market.
With TFS 2010, there is a TFS Basic version/configuration options. You can use SQL Server Express as the database, the install is simple and quick and you can install it on a client OS. It includes version system, work items and build system (no sharepoint, reporting...). Price should not be high, the target users for TFS Basic are those used to use SourceSafe. Also if you have MSDN, there is a change that it goes with it, so you would not have to pay extra.
Some thoughts on TFVC in general -- note that I've never used TFVC specifically, but I've been in a similar situation a couple times. My main concern is that it's too little.
TFVC (Team Foundation Version Control) appears to be a client-server version control system. I don't know anybody who hasn't upgraded to DVCS yet. I've never used TFVC but I can't imagine what benefits it'd offer to outweigh the architectural disadvantage. (And before you ask: I only use it from my workstation in the office, where the network has never gone down, but I still use its distributed features every day.)
I also work at a small Microsoft shop with 4 developers and we have never once regretted using Mercurial. It's one of the few decisions we made that everybody seems to have loved. It's one of those moves, like switching to a language with GC, that you never want to even think about reversing.
In terms of support, I hope you found some way to get great support from Microsoft. Things will come up with any VCS and it looks like community support is a couple orders of magnitude worse than Hg or Git.
I can't say much about bug trackers -- I think they're all pretty much the same these days. I've installed a couple open-source ones in an afternoon, even with no experience. The major difference seems to be, if you go with a big-name one, you'll be able to find lots of tools and extensions that work with it. For example, there are a million and one extensions for reporting/testing/etc. for Bugzilla. TFS probably has similar things, for enough money.
Two other things I'd keep in mind:
First, even if you only want these 2 features today, you will want other features in the future, and it will be (sooner or later) something Microsoft doesn't offer. So it's best to make peace with 3rd-party tools ASAP.
Second, unless you miraculously happen to pick the perfect set of tools for your company's future growth for all time, you will at some point want to migrate away from whatever solution you pick today. So make sure it either provides a way to do a full export, or is popular enough that other projects are falling over themselves to write importers for it.
I guess this all sounds kind of negative for TFS. I didn't really mean it that way -- I'm sure it does some things really well. But unless you're rolling in dough already, save your money.
Good luck with whatever you choose!
TFS work ittm tracking is awesome. Whatever your workflow is and the information you want to gather, you can do it easily with TFS.
Most expect TFS to do what they do out of the box as if it were omniscient. Unfortunately, you do things slightly differently than me and I from everyone else. The key is making it easy for the many different roles in your organization to get and input information into whatever your work tracking system is.
There is a plateau you will reach with custom, cobbled together tools that you won't get from cross referencing information along the product development process. TFS removes that barrier. The second barrier is knowing how to consume the information and that takes training and experience in effectively managing projects.
TFS Version control is certainly the low point when compared to the industry right now. DVCS popularity exploded about the time TFS came out. That said, Brian Harry has stated that TFS "fully expect that we will be adding distributed version control to TFS." http://blogs.msdn.com/bharry/archive/2010/01/27/codeplex-now-supports-mercurial.aspx
Take that as you will.
TFS is a great system but after having deployed and used it for some time I realize that the TCO is just too high to justify for a small team.
We have a small 3 developer team that is currently using Subversion for our source control. We expect the team to group to 8 members within the next 6 to 12 months. We are considering changing our source control to either TFS or Mercurial for improved branching. I know TFS is overkill for just branching, but that is the immediate need, and the other features of TFS could aid our team. One of our main concerns with TFS is we've heard that there is a lot of overhead deploying it, especially on a small team. I'm hoping to get some community insight into just how much overhead there may be involved, suggestions to make the process easier, and anything else the community may feel is useful in making the decision to implement.
In my experience, TFS works really well, even for small teams. If your total number of developers is five or less, you can use the relatively affordable Workgroup edition: above that, you'll have to pony up for the real thing, pricing for which is definitely in the 'Enterprise' realm...
The biggest hurdle to starting to use TFS is installing the darn thing: this process seems to be designed for maximum aggravation. (The extent to which the 'designers' of the 2005-to-2008 upgrade 'process' despise their users even manages to go beyond that: fortunately, you'll be able to start with TFS2008 and won't have to worry about upgrading for a while).
If you follow the instructions exactly, you should manage in 2-3 tries, though, and the hardware requirements aren't as bad as they seem. My 3-developer TFS setup runs quite comfortable on a previous-generation Dell laptop with 4GB of RAM.
One of the big advantages of TFS is the VS integration: this works just really, really well, and shelving and branching are implemented in a more straightforward way than with any other systems I've seen.
The process guidance and support in TFS are a bit less polished, but still quite usable. The pluggable support for several development methodologies is quite nice, and several third-party add-ons (for example for Scrum) are available already.
All in all, it definitely won't hurt to try TFS: if you have a MSDN subscription, you probably already have the Workgroup edition as well as a trial of the full version: otherwise, you can downloaded the latter from Microsoft as well.
UPDATE, April 12th, 2010: With the release of Team Foundation Server 2010, the installation and upgrade procedures have improved a lot. A new TFS2010 install shouldn't take you more than a few minutes (assuming you already have an instance of SQL Server 2008 up and running) and even an in-place upgrade of my TFS2008 setup proved to be entirely painless.
Setup of TFS is not too complicated, when you exactly follow the given guide step by step. We are using it on a small team for about one year now and i don't want to miss it any more.
Especially when you use more than one part of tfs like version control and work item tracking and maybe even teambuild, your team will benefit of the tight integration of the seperate parts.
For example, you can link to workitems when checking in code changes.
Then you run an automated build with teambuild and it will automatically update your workitems with the build number.
So afterwards you can see for example in a bug workitem the buildnumber which contains the bugfix.
We also use the sharepoint wiki for documentation and planning although i'm not the biggest sharepoint fan...
The main point is the great integration into the IDE and for workitem tracking the Teamsystem Web Access which allows you to control at least your workitems over a webinterface.
It's been awhile, but I'm thinking that it takes about a half-day to get setup, plus some time reading the manuals beforehand to make sure you know what you're doing. Configuration doesn't take too long -- you need to add all of your developers in as licensed users. Setting up projects is not too hard. I usually set up AD groups to map on the project roles and add those groups to the appropriate roles. I set up a new project in about 1/2 hour.
Note: I don't use any of the features of TFS except source control. If you plan to item tracking, use the project sharepoint site, etc., your mileage will vary quite a bit. I've found that on our projects (2-3 developers) a wiki works just as well for project management.
Around here we have been working with a bunch of Visual Source Safe repositories for about 10 years or so.
Now I want to get rid of sourcesafe and move on to Team Foundation Server.
Do you have any tips or tricks for me before I embark on this migration? What are the things I have to be careful about?
I am sure this migration will mean that our working habits have to be modified in some way. Do you think that these changes could be a problem for the organization? Think about a group of about 20 .NET developers in a single site.
There are a few different ways you can migrate. The tool will pull your history, etc. over, but the more pragmatic and simple way is to lock VSS as a history archive and start fresh:
Have everyone check in all changes into VSS, make sure everything builds, etc.
Set all VSS databases to "locked" (read-only rights for all users)
Get Latest on the entire VSS database into a "clean" set of folders on a workstation
Check all of the files into TFS from the workstation
For any history prior to the conversion, folks need to go to VSS, but after a week or two it's realistically unlikely to happen all that often. And you know that the history in VSS is accurate and not corrupted by the conversion process.
Be aware that TFS does not support sharing files between different projects, as VSS does. If you have any such shared files the link between them will be broken during the migration, resulting in initially identical, but now distinct files in each project. Updates to one of these files in TFS will no longer propagate to the copies in the other projects.
If you do choose to use the VSSConverter.exe tool that ships with Visual Studio Team Foundation Server, then you should install TFS 2008 SP1 first as it includes a number of improvements as detailed on this blog by the migration tools team.
Some of the key features of the
release include:
Elimination of namespace conflicts. I
previously blogged about this as "the
rename problem" and we have fixed the
converter to correctly migrate files
with overlapping namespaces. This was
the biggest pain point for most users
trying to use previous versions of the
tool.
Automatic solution rebinding.
In this latest version, VS solution
files will be automatically upgraded
to the 9.0 version and checked back in
to version control. Previously users
were required to do this manually.
Correcting of timestamp
inconsistencies. The use of client
timestamps by VSS can lead to
revisions being recorded in the
opposite order that they actually
occurred in. The tool now recognizes
this issue and continues migrating
changes where it would previously
fail.
Improved logging. Although
we've fixed a lot of issues, providing
better, more detailed logging will
help users that do run into issues
diagnose the problems.
I just googled, but this walkthrough seems like a good reference, and it mentions the tool VSSConverter which should help you make the migration as painless as possible.
I would like to recommend one thing though: Backup. Backup everything before you do this. Should anything go wrong it's better to be safe than sorry.
My links aren't showing up. This is the address: http://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/library/ms181247(VS.80).aspx
We are currently in the process of doing this at my day job. We are actually making the switch over in about a month. I am a main part of the migration and a big part of why we are getting off of SourceSafe. To help in the migration, I used the Visual Studio® Team System 2008 Team Foundation Server and Team Suite VPC Image. It was very useful. Right off the bat, the image contains a full working TFS installation for you to play and demo with. It also includes Hands on Labs and one of the labs is running the VSS -> TFS migration tool. If you have an MSDN subscription, once you have played with the image, the next step would be to install the TFS Small Team edition that comes with your subscription.
One thing to note is to make sure you get the latest Service Packs for Visual Studio 2008 and the .NET Framework installed on the image. The service packs fixed some annoying bugs and it definately increased the usability of the system. We have a farely large SourceSafe database with about 90+ projects and the migration tool took about 32 hours to complete. First I made a backup of our sourcesafe database for testing. Then I made the migration on the test sourcesafe database. Afterwards, I checked the source tree in TFS and everything transferred fine. We kept all the history for our source files from VSS which was great. No need to keep that stinking VSS database around after we go live.
We are taking the migration in steps. First the source control and letting our developers get use to using it. Then after that we will be migrating the QA and Business Analysts over to use the Work Item tracking features.
My advice is to take the migration in steps. Don't do too much at one time. Give time for people who will be using the system to train up.
VSS Converter is a far from perfect solution. And there are significant differences between the 2005 and the 2008SP1 version of the converter.
For example, in a VSS DB that's been in use for a long time, there will have been a large number of users contributing to VSS. Many of these users will have left the organisation a long time ago and therefore will no longer have domain accounts. TFS requires mapping VSS users to domain accounts, so you will have to decide whether you map old users to a single 'dummy' domain account or to a current team member.
In addition, VSS Converter 2008 requires these domain accounts to be valid TFS accounts. Whereas the 2005 converter does not enforce this.
If your VSS history contains significant folder Moves, then it's likely you will loose all history before this Move. For example, if you Move a folder to a new location, then Delete the previous parent, you will loose all history. See this article for more explanation:
http://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/library/ms253166.aspx
In one migration I was involved with, we had a 10 year old VSS database that lost all history prior to 6 months ago. This was due to a significant tidy up that took place 6 months ago.
TFS conversion tool <-- Use this
I've used this tool for some times already, the results are pretty satisfatory as it comes with the history of changesets from SourceSafe if you desire too.
Anyway, using this tool you should always pay attention to errors and warnings in the log, and check if everything built okay / passed okay.
It's recomended to also run an Analysis on SS before running this.
Hope it helps
Good guidance there from my former colleage Guy Starbuck. Another thing to add with that approach - you may have decided over time that you want to refactor the way your application is organized (folders etc) and this will give you an oppurtunity to do so.
I've been in situations where we organized a solution haphazardly without thought (let alone major changes in the application) which led to a desire to organize things differently - and the move from VSS to TFS is a great oppurtunity to do so.
As far as the original question:
And: this migration will for sure mean that our working habits have to be modified in some way. Do you think that this changes could be a problem for the organization? Think to a group of about 20 .net developers, in a single site
I would say - yes your working habits will change but much more for the better.
You no should use "Check-out" Locks and "Get-Latest on Check-out".
You can now effectively Branch and Merge
You will now have "Changesets" all files checked-in at the same time will be grouped together. This makes historical change tracking much easier - but more importantly - rollbacks are much easier (ie find all files checked in at the same time and roll them back)
Associating Check-ins to Work Items. Don't overlook Work Items! The biggest mistake you can make is to only use TFS as a VSS replacement. The Build and Project Management features are excellent - you paid for them - USE THEM!
As far as details on how your experience will change, another former colleague of mine (and Team System MVP) Steve St. Jean wrote a detailed article on the differences: From VSS to TFS