Be Excellent To Each Other

So! We're under a stupid deadline (That is, before the requirements are completed we know we'll miss it) so our boss decides to stick with our antiquated toolset. The rest of us want to jump to VS2010 and Team Foundation Server 2010 since it's the only chance we'll get to make the break for this All New Shiny.

For some reason, my starting to make "ooh!" noises about it seems to have swung him towards the group perspective, and I've been given a fortnight or so (coincidental "accidentally finished my work 3 weeks early" hole in my time allocation) to look into it.

So I'm currently installing Windows Server 2003 R2 SP1 in a virtual machine and VS2010 on the main OS alongside VS2005.

Does anyone know anything about TFS2010? We're looking at rolling over to it for source control, reporting, planning, issue tracking, building, testing - all the major tick boxes except Sharepoint, profiling and coverage, essentially.

But going from zero knowledge to full implementation is looking quite the hurdle (especially in a fortnight!), so maybe phasing it in starting with source control is possible?

-- Excited but slightly flummoxed of Manchester

Yes, but only because it used to be unmitigated crap and was useless in terms of source control and continuous integration!
I think the newest version is "ok" for various definitions of "ok"

My recommendation would be to not go with all encompassing, and to go subversion for source control and choose the other tools you want based on what you need.

Test tools are my bag though, what sort of testing are you looking to do? unit testing via ci? web functional testing? swing apps?

If we don't do TFS we'll stay with what we've got (VS2005, Sourcesafe, custom issue tracking, manual report writing). Testing-wise, it's just the idea of having the tester environment being a way for the testers to get their work items and say "Yeah, that's ok/shit" like they already do, basically.

The original Team Suite was a non-starter when we evaluated it at my last job, but it does look like they've got their act together this time; if it works at all like they say it'll be great.

My boss said, when I was trying to find somewhere to install it, "why not stick it on [our server]?" to which I replied "Hahahahano." He got carried away, a mistake I'm not going to make. Hence putting it in a VM to muck about with.

The only proviso I can give you from a testing perspective, is that TFS used to be an absolute nightmare to rollback or identify what source code had got into what release, as its source labelling was crazy and you couldn't migrate a release binary through environments easily.

If that is now ok, then my complaints come down to bigotry and hearsay

Hm. Cheers.

I'll ask a couple of questions at our place and see what people think of TFS2010, we do those sort of assessments quite a bit, but i'm not sure if we have done one on 2010 yet...

If I hear anything I'll let you know.

From what I've heard, it's not so great. Can't say anymore than that though for contractual reasons.

TFS has plenty of things wrong with it, but compared to running Visual Fucking Sourcesafe it'll be like manna from heaven. However, it's rather big, and two weeks isn't very long.

Subversion FTW!

At work we use Fogbugz, Subversion, Review Board, and MediaWiki. I think we should have just bought TFS.

I try and stay away from tools discussions as much as possible these days when in work, the best tool is always the one that works in the situation you're in and you can afford.

Unfortunately, one of the first questions I usually get asked on a client site is "what tools do you recommend"

Your-client-Feex.

Indeed, give me a bit of time to understand your situation and I can answer that. First question out of the box when you haven't told me anything yet is a bit much

We use subversion and a dozen other customised tools and all in all I'd be happier going back to TFS (used it at my previous job), yes its not perfect and requires serious admin work initially but its a one stop solution and pretty damn good.
Using it day-to-day from a developers point of view its great, everything in one place and it works.

Sourcesafe? *shudder*

We use git. It's what all the cool kids are using nowadays.