As I indicated in a previous post we have recently moved away from SourceSafe and started using Subversion. Since my involvement with the VS2005 betas and using TFS for a couple of small projects I have always been an advocate but there are a couple of things that just don’t make it the right decisions for most SMEs. The first obvious hurdle is the price but I think this is only a minor issue now that Microsoft have a great partner pricing program where you get a TFS license and a number of CALs depending on your partner status (I think it is 10 for certified and 35 for gold partners).
More important than price are the limitations of v1 of TFS. The two that come to mind are:
- One of the things that staggered me when I was using it was that there was no built in build scheduling – I would have thought that this would have been a fundamental part of such as system. The build system should be able to be triggered based on certain events (not just code checkin, perhaps event work item status change?).
- No support for working offline. There is support at the project management level as you can export lists to excel, work on them offline and then sync them when you are again connected. Unfortunately you need to use a power toy to enable offline support for source control. And even then it isn’t true support (as I understand it). The TFS team really needs to look at how Subversion works – yes that’s right Steve (Intilecta’s Development Manager) I’m a convert now!
Microsoft, if you really want to work in this space there are some significant issues to be addressed in vNext of TFS to make it a compelling business decision.
(Oh, by the way Grant, Intilecta’s SourceSafe (unpatched) repository is just marginally older than your process 😉