Is the Team Foundation Server 2010 of the VS 2010 necessary for doing personal projects?

Question

Basically what the title says. I am looking to install the Visual Studio 2010 Beta for compiling personal C++ projects. I haven't made it through the tutorial for setting things up, but do I need the Server part of the program if I don't plan on doing any team projects?

Thanks.

Edit: Well it looks like I can't install the Team Foundation Server anyways without downloading a bunch of other crap. Will the rest of it install without it?

Answer 1

You don't need TFS 2010 for your personal projects.

Answer 2

Team Foundation Server is for source control, data collection, reporting, and project tracking. To connect to the server you need the Team Explorer extension installed on your Visual Studio and get a client access license.

I guess you don't need to connect to a server to develop personal projects. For a comparison of Visual C++ 2010 editions, see http://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/library/hs24szh9%28VS.100%29.aspx.

Answer 3

1) No, you don't need it.

Unless you really want all the TFS features, you'll be installing masses of stuff for no real gain. Having said that, if you want to use source control, profiling, code analysis and those sort of handy things, it would be one way to achieve this - though you'd probably still be better off with a couple of specific third party tools than the whole TFS install if you only want a few of these tools.

2) No, you don't need to install all the bits to make it work.

Unless something has changed a lot with 2010, the basic VSTS install is more or less the same as the Pro version of VS - and then you install the Team Explorer on top to gain the TFS specific client-side extensions.

In fact, you can go much further by doing a custom install and turning off a lot of stuff that you don't want (VS includes a load of stuff for targetting platforms you will probably never see with languages you may not have even heard of :-). That said, unless disk space is a major concern, it's easier and safer to just go for a standard install, because that is always going to be the best tested configuration - once you start removing bits there is a tendency for odd little things to stop working properly.