New Tools - Team Foundation Server
So, we've been evaluating some new tools and configurations. The most important thing has been to get rid of that POS Visual SourceSafe. A lot of us were leaning towards Subversion as the replacement. There is a strong bias towards staying on the Microsoft® platform, however. As a result we did an install and are evaluating Team Foundation Server (TFS).
TFS is Microsoft's answer to being late to the party on all innovations in software engineering that have been coming out of the Java/Ruby/et. all camps. This includes automated unit testing, continuous integration, wiki-style collaboration and communication, and optimistic and stable source control. They also seem to be realizing that MS Project has outlived its usefulness in the software development area and are setting up a beachhead against the Rally and VersionOnes of the world.
First impression: This is another 1.0 product by MS where they throw a bunch of shit against the wall and see what sticks. The source control seems OK - something like SourceDepot which is their internally used product (you didn't think they were managing the Windows source tree with VSS, did you?). That was shoe-horned in with SharePoint - which I absolutely hate. SharePoint takes the simplicity of a Wiki as a collaborative tool, adds tons of power and complexity for supporting corporate environments and multiple file formats, and makes it near impossible to do the simple, cool things a wiki could. Those are the two big features. Beyond that they did this total half-assed approach to task and bug management which is just some sick joke built on top of an Excel spreadsheet managed by SharePoint.
TFS is a persnickety product. Don't expect the server you put it on to multi-task. It really wants to be the only thing on the box. At least, it wants to be the first thing on the box. I had to reinstall IIS because we had been hosting multiple apps on the target box and the default configuration had been monkeyed with too much for TFS's tastes, so it flat refused to install.
Documentation lies somewhere between poor and very poor (but not none). No where does it tell you what to do if you already have VSS integrated on your dev machine (VS2005>Tools>Options>Source Control setting). They seem to have shipped the product without as complete a tool set as I'm used to seeing from the MS development tools, but they do have several examples of writing your own. I'm guessing they rushed to market and are hoping a developer community will coalesce and fill in the blanks.
Be looking for second impressions soon where I'll go over some of the automated build, unit testing, and check-in policy tools.
TFS is Microsoft's answer to being late to the party on all innovations in software engineering that have been coming out of the Java/Ruby/et. all camps. This includes automated unit testing, continuous integration, wiki-style collaboration and communication, and optimistic and stable source control. They also seem to be realizing that MS Project has outlived its usefulness in the software development area and are setting up a beachhead against the Rally and VersionOnes of the world.
First impression: This is another 1.0 product by MS where they throw a bunch of shit against the wall and see what sticks. The source control seems OK - something like SourceDepot which is their internally used product (you didn't think they were managing the Windows source tree with VSS, did you?). That was shoe-horned in with SharePoint - which I absolutely hate. SharePoint takes the simplicity of a Wiki as a collaborative tool, adds tons of power and complexity for supporting corporate environments and multiple file formats, and makes it near impossible to do the simple, cool things a wiki could. Those are the two big features. Beyond that they did this total half-assed approach to task and bug management which is just some sick joke built on top of an Excel spreadsheet managed by SharePoint.
TFS is a persnickety product. Don't expect the server you put it on to multi-task. It really wants to be the only thing on the box. At least, it wants to be the first thing on the box. I had to reinstall IIS because we had been hosting multiple apps on the target box and the default configuration had been monkeyed with too much for TFS's tastes, so it flat refused to install.
Documentation lies somewhere between poor and very poor (but not none). No where does it tell you what to do if you already have VSS integrated on your dev machine (VS2005>Tools>Options>Source Control setting). They seem to have shipped the product without as complete a tool set as I'm used to seeing from the MS development tools, but they do have several examples of writing your own. I'm guessing they rushed to market and are hoping a developer community will coalesce and fill in the blanks.
Be looking for second impressions soon where I'll go over some of the automated build, unit testing, and check-in policy tools.
Labels: tools
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