Up until recently I had been using trac and svn to manage my code base and coordinate updates to the system I’m working on. Then we started requiring FXCop to police coding standards, that’s when we discovered team suite had it inbuilt and hop, skip and a jump and I was looking at the team foundation server feature list.Essentially what it provides is a central point for all project management. You have your task tracking system, your source control, your continuous integration, progress reports and development cycle all handled by tfs.
It does all this by integrating with Sharepoint Services and SQL Server 2005+ (& Reporting Services). So everything including source control is stored on your SQL server, and all your permissions are Windows Auth, so it works really well with active directory.
One of the nicest features of the system is the source control, it took a bit of getting used to but there is something really awesome about being able create a Task inside Visual Studio, do the work required to complete that task, hit check in and associate the changeset with the task all without switching windows.
As with trac you can create views on the bugs/tasks that need to be resolved, but being able to define the area the bug happened in gets easier as you can create a tree that defines the application and pick any point in that tree to assign the bug to.
With team build you can set up builds to go off when checkins are made or they can be triggered by users you give the priviledges to do so. Its ridiculously easy to set up and it uses MSBuild to build and MSTest to Unit Test. In your visual studio window it gives you the result of the build, including any unit tests passed and failed.
TFS exposes web services through the IIS site it creates which you connect to using team suite using Visual Studio or for that matter any other application (of which there are quite a few) allowing you to connect behind the vast majority of firewalls and allowing you freedom to write an application specific to your needs when developing. Personally I only use the Team System Web Access tool to allow people who don’t use Visual Studio to add tasks to the project so far but when I get some more time I’ll go digging through them.
The one major problem I found with it is that configuring Active Directory and Sharepoint are a pain in the ass if you’ve never done it before, specifically when trying to make it accessible from outside your network. The advantage is of course that everything works with IIS and all the technology that is already in place in most Microsoft project and product houses. Its also easier to configure active directory than it is to set up all the things that TFS provides using open source software but I still wonder what I’ll be doing in a few years when the Microsoft Biz Spark program runs out and we have to start paying for software.
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