The company for which I work has an MSDN license and upgrading to TFS 2010 from 2008 is not an expensive option. However, neither my colleagues or me have been able to find any features that make this something we feel we need. Is anyone experienced with TFS 2010 enough to convince me that my company needs this?
To clarify: we have no intention of moving to a different source control product. The question is what features of TFS 2010 are worth an upgrade from TFS 2008?
In general using a bunch of opensource projects, and free versions of team city, svn, ankh, etc. You can get what TFS has to offer for free, or almost at no costs, so perhaps the only reason is that you will get all of this in one package, integrated with visual studio which is a good and a bad thing.
the bad thing is that the company I worked for had tfs and my workspace mapping blew up 3 times in a year, now this may sound like no big deal in a years time, but downloading the whole tree was a 4-5 hours of pain and frustration.
the up side of tfs is the shelve feature, I use it constantly.
We looked at TFS - but the management headaches were simply too much. We then went with a combo of SVN, Jira and fisheye.
We did evaluate the TFS quite extensively, but frankly at the 2008 release point, we didn't find anything that'd have compelled us to move. But then your millage might vary.
If it costs you money to do so, I couldn't provide you with a great reason why you should upgrade. If it were a free upgrade, I would do it simply to stay current.
disclaimer: I haven't moved to 2010 yet either, but probably will
Biggest feature for me: (we use branching to manage large feature sets and to separate SPs, QFE's, and major releases)
TFS 2010 will track changes across branches.
Example: suppose I change something in the Dev branch, and then you merge dev to main. Now suppose that someone uses the Annotate feature (on the main branch) to figure out who changed that code. In TFS 2008, it would report that you made the change (because you checked in the merge). Reportedly, TFS 2010 will be aware that I actually orginated the change in the dev branch, and it will be able to tell you that. That's gold if you are using branching.
Also, correct me if I'm wrong, but didn't they switch 2010 to use a single SQL database? (or maybe 1 for source control, and one warehouse?). If so, then the backup strategy gets a bit better. MS says that all of the TFS databases should be backed up from the same moment in time, but that's tough to do when there are 5-odd databases (it's very difficult to ensure that all of them reflect exactly the same point in time transactionally). If they have consolidated databases, then it should be easier.
One other: depending upon the level of MSDN that you have, TFS 2010 might be free for you now.
My number one reason for moving to tfs 2010 was our move from VS 2008 to 2010. Quite frankly I just didn't want to deal with ANY issues in using a newer product (studio) with an older one (tfs).
To be fair, I don't personally know of incompatibilities, but my time is precious enough that I certainly don't want to find myself in a position where I have to upgrade my server later (probably at a critical juncture) because something isn't working right.
BTW, when I first read the "upgrade" path instructions, it was a little scary.
Step 1. Backup everything ( good ).
Step 2. Uninstall everything.. ( scary part )
Step 3. Install the new TFS
Step 4. finally get to do the actual upgrading of the databases.
Step 2 is what I almost turned back on. the idea of spending an unknown amount of time restoring the TFS server from backup was not a pleasant one. However, in the end, the upgrade process was absolutely smooth. With the longest amount of time uninstalling visual studio 2008 (required for the build server and various testing pieces). That took a couple hours.
So far I haven't really used any of the "new" features yet. The upgrade let our existing build scripts to continue doing deployments; which is one of the features I'm looking forward to playing with when I have time.