Visual Studio 2008/2010 - Professional vs Team System

Question

Hi,

Ok, I know this isnt a programming question, but I think its really important to understand the differences to be a more productive developer...so please don't close this question!! And yes, I do feel stupid for asking this question! Have only ever worked with the Prof edition of VS 2005/2008.

Now that we have a team of 6 people, I would like to what benefits Team System would offer us over 6 licenses of VS Professional? Also, what advantages does Team Foundation Server offer?

your responses r much appreciated. Thanks!

Answer 1

TFS can be good if you use work items and are interested in associating source changes with these work items. Otherwise, using it for a couple of weeks at a customer (that was not using work items) just made me want to run back to subversion. Merging UI is not very good (to be polite), the VS plug-in always wants to contact the TFS server to check for any changes of the files you're using, there are false warnings of conflicts...

Note that I am the guy that usually defends Microsoft against the Java/PHP guys, so it is very strange for me to write this...

Answer 2

The major difference between Professional & Team System is Team Foundation Server. Team Foundation Server is the massive overhaul/replacement of Visual SourceSafe. But TFS also gives you other functionality such as work item tracking and other features to manage the complete development life cycle.

Answer 3

Team system, even without team foundation server has code analysis capabilities and metrics for your code that actually quantifies how maintainable it is. For a project manager this is nirvana when trying to find out who does a great job on their code and for a developer it gives him hard facts about where to improve his code.

That being said I think Team Foundation Server might be overkill for a team of 6 people except if you are building an extremely large system.

Answer 4

Hey, thanks to all for the answers so far! I have never worked in a team/collaborative environment before, so this is a tad bit new to me. We are in the midst of acquiring a "Microsoft Visual Studio 2008 Professional Edition with MSDN Premium subscription". I know that this package gets updated to "Visual Studio 2010 Premium with MSDN" on March 22 2010.

Will I still be able to leverage collaborative efforts using this package? Is it worth the $2970 additional cost?

EDIT: We are applying for the Empower for ISVs subscription. We work mainly on SaaS/RIA solutions. Am I understanding the term "Work Item" correctly - that is if I wish to task Developer 1 with say XHTML/CSS, Developer 2 with a certain functional module, and Developer 3 with another functional module - each of these is considered a work item that can be easily tracked with VSTS?

Answer 5

If you are comfortable with Subversion or a different version control manager, you are dont mind using Nunit (or alternative unit test tool) and you are familiar with or can find the open source (or fee based) code metric tools, and you have bug tracker in place you can save quite a bit of money on the licensing.

I have worked a lot with Team System, and at some clients, just the Pro Version. While some of the integration TS offers is slick, I am so used to nUnit and Subversion that I actually miss them at times when working in TS.

Now in 2010, the Ultimate edition does offer some great UML diagramming and code analysis tools that I will miss in lower versions.

Answer 6

TFS is a great source control tool for every organization. And is much advance than Visual Source Safe. It also has work item management (for tasks) simmilar to Rational software. We are using it for years and not just for .Net languages.

With the Team System version you already have a Team Explorer wherein your users can access the source control. Also Team System consists of different sub products that targets specific job functions such as Team System for Development Edition (For developers), Team System Database Edition (For database architect), Team System Architect Edition (For System Architect), and Team System Test Edition (For testers). All those subversions are included on the Team Suite edition.

For the Professional version it could also benefit to the TFS source control system if the machine is installed with Team Explorer.