Stay with Visual SourceSafe or go to the Team Foundation Server 2010

Question

We are a small group of six developers who currently use Visual Studio 2003 and Microsoft Visual SourceSafe (HVAC). Everyone has the responsibility for its program was not sharing code with each other. Everyone has responsibility for its own version handling, the codes is not in a common version handling.

We will now update to Visual Studio 2010 and are thinking about while we move to Team Foundation Server 2010 (TFS) or if we should continue with the plumbing. I want to go over, but several of my colleagues are doubtful.

1. What are the pros and cons for the US to move to TFS?
2. In addition to version handling, what in TFS will we find useful?
3. Is TFS the right tool for the way we're working on, or is it overkill?
4. Can you work with the code offline? We sometimes work with our laptops at home or at the customer

I have not found anywhere what it costs.

Answer 1

First of all, Sourcesafe will the support for Visual Sourcesafe will end soon: http://support.microsoft.com/lifecycle/search/default.aspx?sort=PN&alpha=sourcesafe&Filter=FilterNO

If that is not enough for you to migrate, then there is an exellent post from Brian Harry (Program Manager of TFS) why you should migrate to TFS: http://blogs.msdn.com/b/bharry/archive/2009/10/01/tfs-2010-for-sourcesafe-users.aspx

In short, TFS is more then Source Control only, it has the Work Items in which you can track your work, add traceability and get Project Management information. It also has an build automation tool with which you can automate the compilation, testing and code validation of your applications.

When you go further it also have great testing capabilities: http://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/library/ms182409.aspx

To answer your questions:

1. There are a lot of pros, and one big con. The con is that you have to migrate, although there is a migration tool for VSS to TFS: http://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/library/ms253060.aspx
2. Work items, build automation, reporting, sharepoint integration, test manager, lab manager
3. TFS is great: it scales from teams like yours to big organizations up till thousands of users.
4. Yes there is the ability to start visual studio without a TFS connection. It then asks whether you want to work offline. When you are online again, you can go online to TFS and it will checks the changes. There is also the ability to expose TFS to the internet, so you can access TFS inside your organization from home.

Answer 2

You can find the pricing info here: http://www.microsoft.com/visualstudio/en-us/products#compareTable

Meanwhile, if you'd like to stay with SourceSafe, you may use SourceAnywhere for VSS, which is a remote access add-on tool for SourceSafe, for integration with VS 2010.

Answer 3

Whether or not you should go to TFS2010 is a debatable question, with many good answers.

Whether or not you should get away from VSS is 100% clear. There are many articles out there on why:

Microsoft's Source Destruction System

VSS: Unsafe at Any Speed

Anything But Sourcesafe

Answer 4

Having recently migrated from VSS to TFS2010 I haven't looked back. I love the way everything is integrated. Without restating what was said before some of the great features are:

• Proper branching & merging
• AD integration, no more setting up users in VSS
• Easy to see who has what checked out
• Easy to see check-in history (great for code reviews)
• TFS Power Tools add custom check-in policies and Windows Explorer context menu
• Work items, tracking and their association with changesets
• Inbuilt reporting
• Team Project Portals - so non developers can access TFS reports/work item info etc
• Speed, it's so much faster than VSS
• Source is stored in SQL server and check-in operations are transactional and not file based, no more running VSS clean up

I found that rather than migrating source code using the migration tool a fresh check-in was the quickest way, keeping SourceSafe in read-only for the odd time I have to refer to the history.