What are the primary advantages of Visual Studio Team Foundation Server over the other versions?

Question

We are looking into the possibility of upgrading to Team Foundation Server 2008 for our development team. One of our primary reasons is some of the deployment capabilities surrounding BizTalk 2009, but I am curious what other benefits there are for other projects outside of BizTalk.

Some of our interests so far are moving to a one click build and deploy process, the addition of unit tests, and continuous integration. Some definite steps forward for the company I work for.

What other benefits or information should I look at as I pitch this to upper management? I am looking for technical reasons, money is a not really a concern for this discussion.

Answer 1

You have a lot of the great features of TFS nailed already (continuous integration, team builds, unit test integration). Some of the other features the teams I've been on have included:

• Great branching and merging support, which is great for teams supporting multiple versions of software concurrently.
• Custom check-in policies to help enforce a stable codebase in your source control.
• Built in support for your QA team via work items which can be accessed via a SharePoint 2007 portal which TFS creates for you, or via TFS Explorer in Visual Studio.

Answer 2

In my personal experience with SourceSafe, and I'd imagine that TFS will have the same issues, if you have any remote developers with the default languages other than the one on the server, you'll have constant headaches. IMHO, the ability to outsource connectivity stinks as well. I migrated to SVN, a decent bug tracking system, and implemented some testing policies, and haven't looked back. Plus, it's a heck of a lot cheaper...

Answer 3

From a process perspective, it comes with the following two templates to choose from for your TFS project

1. MSF for Agile Software Development
2. MSF for CMMI Process Improvement

In addition to above templates, Scrum template is available from Scrum for Team System

Answer 4

I've worked on a large BizTalk 2006 project, and personal BizTalk projects using Subversion/TeamCity (build server) and Tortoise which all worked extremely well; I'm now working on a small BizTalk 2009 project based on TFS2010 and it is painful.

It could simply be my (lack of) experience with TFS, however it doesn't seem 'polished'; and given the fact that I need to do everything in Visual Studio, I feel as though I am losing control over many artifacts that do not easily sit within VS (yes I know that 2009 is now a 1st class citizen).

If I were making the decision as to which platform to go down, I would use Subversion/TeamCity and Tortoise (or possibly Mercurial but I haven't had time to investigate that yet). From a cost perspective, think 'nil' for a small scale project. In terms of features, they achieve everything that TFS can do - branching, merging, continuous integration etc. In fact, I've just made this recommendation to a client with a small BizTalk development team who are looking to move from Sourcesafe.