Jason Zander is Corporate Vice President for the Visual Studio team in the Developer Division at Microsoft. Learn more about Jason.
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If you are a SourceSafe user you know VSS is an easy to install and easy to use source control system. TFS gives you a much more powerful system including not only source control but also work item tracking and build support. Today we are announcing the new Basic configuration for TFS coming your way with Beta 2 of VS2010. Brian Harry has a great post introducing the new configuration and going over some history and design goals. My favorite features:
I’ve been using it to build out several new tutorials I’m queuing up for Beta 2. It’s awesome! Stay tuned for Beta 2 and make sure to give it a try...
Will there be a new tool or enhancement to the existing VSS importer?
You're kidding. You're trying to sell a revision control system by making *positive* comparisons to VSS?
Who uses VSS anymore? We used to use Vault and it was crappy too. We have moved to SVN since then and now I have a smile on my face all day.
VSS is great for a small shop with few devs, I use it everyday and am totally happy with it, never had an issue with it. I've tried SVN as I was curious since people always bash VSS, and I don't know what all the fuss is about - my experience was either use a command line or an unstable shell extension that crashes explorer often. Then I happily stay with VSS.
But I'm glad that you're creating a basic TFS version - my only gripe with using VSS now is that Blend only supports TFS. So the question is, will Blend work with TFS Basic?
Jason, as a small team leader I think this great! This should be the final push to get our projects off vss.
Will there be some sort of MSBuild integration?
We are chomping at the bit for beta 2!
Great news! Any chance we'll see a "free for a single user" version like source gear does with their Vault product? If TFS had a lower cost of entry I'd really like to use it as my personal source control system. It would be great if this Lite version was part of MSDN!
@Alex - we are working on the VSS importer and it will work well with this version as well as the full one
@Joe - VSS is one of the most used source control systems ever
@Praveen - Sorry to hear that; I hope you'll give TFS basic a try. The addition of integrated work item tracking and build support in one system is very powerful. After you try it out, I'd love to hear your feedback.
@Chris - Blend will indeed work with this configuration. The Basic config really is the same core code made to work better on your client
@Tom - This configuration comes with build support so you are covered
@JC - we're not ready to talk about pricing just yet but we are working on making things very accessible
I'm all for a TFS that doesn't require a billion dollar IT setup, full time sysadmin, and a freaking crystal ball to install...
But I hope basic is free. Even teensy software shops need some kind of halfway decent source control. Besides, TFS isn't JUST source control (although its the only inteligable feature TFS has...
*sigh* why are people so hot for TFS? It's like web developers that drool over webforms, makes me want to shake some rational thought into them.
As someone recently remarked "VSS is the IE6 of SCM", my response was "and TFS is the IE7".
If you can't drag yourself into the new, distributed, world ( that's git for the ignorant of hg / bazaar if you really have to spend money for IT), at least step up to subversion. It's fast, free and if you need simple and manageable, use Visual SVN.
You can do more with far less by steering clear of TFS.
Neal - do me a favor and try it when it comes out. The key thing we are doing with TFS is integration. You get one place to track source control, all your defects / work items, and builds. That combination is hard to get out of a particular one off source control system. try beta 2 and send us your feedback.
Hi! I'm evaluating the new features on VSTS 2010, but since the PDC release I'm missing information about what happened with TF Proxy.
Do you if there will be any change? Does it still part of VSTS?
Thanks
Hi there! I'll surely give it a try. I'm hoping it to be a totally new product, way better than the 2008 version. The TFS 2008 installation setup was a nightmare and, worst than that, it was a product labeled as "2008" which didn't support SQL Server 2008 until SP1 (and didn't support x64 even after SP1). Now TFS 2010 need to win ours heart again, because in the other corder of the ring, the SVN+TRAC combo is (1st) very nice, (2nd) free and (3rd) open-source.
Hey Jason, WTF does TFS stand for?
I would never want to go back to VSS (my company's network is high latency, and that app will even hit the server when you give the window focus, making browsing particularly painful). That being said, I have grown to dislike TFS 2008 insofar as it has a nasty tendency to drain every spare cycle from my CPU (often hanging in the process). I hope TFS2010 improves the client experience, as my company will not move to SVN. Nothing quite like having an app gum up the mouse pointer in 2009.
andeezle: it's "Team Foundation Server" (although I will sometimes refer to it as just "Team System")
Keith, I'd love to hear more about your specific concerns with TFS 2008. Are you referring to the Team Explorer plugin in Visual Studio? There are many performance improvements for 2010 that should help improve your overall experience here (both on the client side and on the server side, making certain server calls faster).
Feel free to e-mail me directly with any specific examples to help me understand your experience.
thanks
Jason Barile (http://blogs.msdn.com/jasonba)