Team Foundation Service
I've been a fan of Team Foundation Server since I first used it little more than 2 years ago. I've used many version control systems in the past along with many different front ends depending on the system. Now, what I'm about to say, I'm saying as a person who is also a fan of Visual Studio; So, if you don't use Visual Studio, what follows is likely not to apply, I know they have integrations with other IDE's I'm just not familiar enough with them to comment if the quality is the same as that provided with Visual Studio. That being said, what I'm about to say is really about the TFS 'eco-system' if you will. So, the service itself, and how it fits in and works with Visual Studio.
Preamble out of the way... good. TFS, has, since I first used it struck me as the only modern, well integrated source control system I've ever used. Other solutions I've used either make you learn a series of complex commands or have ugly, ancient UI's that don't do the job well. Everyone now and again, yes there is a need to go to a command prompt to do some obscure function. But common functions? Yes, as a user of versioning control systems I am a programmer and could develop solutions for these problems... but what is the point. I want to version MY software, not write software to make someone else's usable. If you can't provide that... I don't feel you really offer a solution at all. Under the hoods, some of the free and/or open source projects probably offer more and better functionality than TFS, and likely simply lack the quality of integration that TFS enjoys in VS.
The heavy coupling to Visual Studio has it draw backs as well, but overall, from day 1 I've wished I could retroactively apply the usage of this versioning system to older versions of products we had at work. We use CVS with WinCVS for our older projects and the UI is cumbersome and unintuitive by comparison. I remember the first day I installed Visual Studio 2008 with the TFS add-on. Within about 10 minutes I was doing everything I had ever done in WinCVS and many things I had never learned how to do or that simply were possible without perhaps a custom front end.
But at the time, I was a little disheartened. At the time TFS was only a paid product, and since it was geared at big business, it had a big price tag (at least it felt that way when thinking about using it for my hobby coding). A few months back I had blogged that they were releasing an Express version of TFS and I was pretty much ecstatic about it (BTW I believe it is GA now). I pulled down the beta and found it incredibly easy to use and setup. But I quickly discovered one minor drawback. Migration. As a consumer and developer hobbyist I go through development machines at a pretty astounding pace. I'm a little strange on the geek front as I don't have an official home server that stays on 24/7 which is another problem. It's easy enough to move SQL databases, but not something I wanted to deal with really. So while I thought that was a huge gift to the development community and I definitely would have adopted it, it wasn't quite a perfect fit either. Note, most versioning systems have that same drawback.
Anyway, before they finally released Visual Studio 2012 I stumbled across a tweet talking about a new online service Microsoft is planning to launch. Team Foundation Service. Basically, this is TFS in the cloud. This particular item is still in beta, and so the accounts they are giving out at the moment are free and fully functional (for the life of the beta) and there is a promise that there will continue to be a free subscription tier after the product is finished. Honestly, all they need to do to entice me is either have the free tier support what TFS express supports and have a cap on users and a reasonable amount of data (say 500MB-5GB) OR have a subscription level that is either competitive and usage based or a low monthly rate and offers what I'm looking for and I'll be on board.
I'm interested to see what the free subscription tier they offer will include. But honestly, I can tell you that as a developer the 2 things that suck the most are 1) Not having versioning control and losing working code when you find a change you made caused other issues and 2) Losing all of your code. Whether it is a hobby or a job, writing anything of value takes time and effort, and no one wants to have that effort wasted. So yes... I'd even be willing to pay to have my data versioned in the cloud. The projects I care about are few, and I'm the only developer, so I'm hopeful that my needs will be met by the free subscription. But like alluded too, if the free subscription doesn't meet my needs, but one of the paid tiers does and is reasonably priced I'll bite. Microsoft made yet another pretty smart move this year with this service.
If the free service doesn't meet my needs, and the paid services are too rich for my blood... then I will likely just grab the Express edition and install it locally on my development laptop until such time as I buy myself a desktop to use as a server. So, actually, Microsoft has likely made 2 smart moves this year surrounding TFS. Even if I don't end up forking over money for a subscription... this definitely motivates me to stay within their eco-system.
Preamble out of the way... good. TFS, has, since I first used it struck me as the only modern, well integrated source control system I've ever used. Other solutions I've used either make you learn a series of complex commands or have ugly, ancient UI's that don't do the job well. Everyone now and again, yes there is a need to go to a command prompt to do some obscure function. But common functions? Yes, as a user of versioning control systems I am a programmer and could develop solutions for these problems... but what is the point. I want to version MY software, not write software to make someone else's usable. If you can't provide that... I don't feel you really offer a solution at all. Under the hoods, some of the free and/or open source projects probably offer more and better functionality than TFS, and likely simply lack the quality of integration that TFS enjoys in VS.
The heavy coupling to Visual Studio has it draw backs as well, but overall, from day 1 I've wished I could retroactively apply the usage of this versioning system to older versions of products we had at work. We use CVS with WinCVS for our older projects and the UI is cumbersome and unintuitive by comparison. I remember the first day I installed Visual Studio 2008 with the TFS add-on. Within about 10 minutes I was doing everything I had ever done in WinCVS and many things I had never learned how to do or that simply were possible without perhaps a custom front end.
But at the time, I was a little disheartened. At the time TFS was only a paid product, and since it was geared at big business, it had a big price tag (at least it felt that way when thinking about using it for my hobby coding). A few months back I had blogged that they were releasing an Express version of TFS and I was pretty much ecstatic about it (BTW I believe it is GA now). I pulled down the beta and found it incredibly easy to use and setup. But I quickly discovered one minor drawback. Migration. As a consumer and developer hobbyist I go through development machines at a pretty astounding pace. I'm a little strange on the geek front as I don't have an official home server that stays on 24/7 which is another problem. It's easy enough to move SQL databases, but not something I wanted to deal with really. So while I thought that was a huge gift to the development community and I definitely would have adopted it, it wasn't quite a perfect fit either. Note, most versioning systems have that same drawback.
Anyway, before they finally released Visual Studio 2012 I stumbled across a tweet talking about a new online service Microsoft is planning to launch. Team Foundation Service. Basically, this is TFS in the cloud. This particular item is still in beta, and so the accounts they are giving out at the moment are free and fully functional (for the life of the beta) and there is a promise that there will continue to be a free subscription tier after the product is finished. Honestly, all they need to do to entice me is either have the free tier support what TFS express supports and have a cap on users and a reasonable amount of data (say 500MB-5GB) OR have a subscription level that is either competitive and usage based or a low monthly rate and offers what I'm looking for and I'll be on board.
I'm interested to see what the free subscription tier they offer will include. But honestly, I can tell you that as a developer the 2 things that suck the most are 1) Not having versioning control and losing working code when you find a change you made caused other issues and 2) Losing all of your code. Whether it is a hobby or a job, writing anything of value takes time and effort, and no one wants to have that effort wasted. So yes... I'd even be willing to pay to have my data versioned in the cloud. The projects I care about are few, and I'm the only developer, so I'm hopeful that my needs will be met by the free subscription. But like alluded too, if the free subscription doesn't meet my needs, but one of the paid tiers does and is reasonably priced I'll bite. Microsoft made yet another pretty smart move this year with this service.
If the free service doesn't meet my needs, and the paid services are too rich for my blood... then I will likely just grab the Express edition and install it locally on my development laptop until such time as I buy myself a desktop to use as a server. So, actually, Microsoft has likely made 2 smart moves this year surrounding TFS. Even if I don't end up forking over money for a subscription... this definitely motivates me to stay within their eco-system.
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