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Closed 10 years ago.
What are the issues we may face if we move from TFS to Fogbugz Kiln?
currently we are using TFS for source control, we are looking at the option to move to Kiln.
we are completely Microsoft development tools based company since we use Visual Studio .net, SQL server, TFS, Windows servers etc..
the reason for move it seems are:
better code review tools in kiln
better branch merge management.
has anyone already done this? does anyone know issues when we use visual studio with Kiln?
I cannot answer your question completely, as I don't use (and have never used) TFS. However, my employer uses StarTeam which is pretty typical as far as source code control.
For me moving from a traditional SCC method of check out/check in, to a distributed model was the first mental hurdle. To get over that hurdle I found that the tutorial at http://hginit.com/ was helpful.
As far as using Kiln for with VS, I use both the Kiln client (essentially TortoiseHg) and a plugin for VS 2010. I can commit, pull, push, etc. from both the Windows Explorer and from Visual Studio. I have had no issues, other than learning mercurial and how distributed version control works.
As far as other issues, the only ones I can think of are updating any build server or continuous integration servers to pull from the appropriate repositories.
Codereview exist in TFS (just download a free extension), merge is very good in TFS, reports are better in TFS, methodologies, integration, and even price.
In my modest point of view. But both are great products, if you work or need distributed sc or mixed teams (linux, etc) also TFS has a solution, but is not so cheap
Branches are better in Mercurial, but this has a price: you're going to have much more branches, and it will be much easier for a developer to make a mistake and do something in a wrong branch. Flexibility may cause confusion.
But the most important thing is your transition plan. If you have a long commit record in TFS, you'd probably want to keep it. Unfortunately, there seemed to be no direct conversion tool to help converting TFS to Hg when I needed one. I tried using tfs2svn with hg convert, but tfs2svn got stuck with complex renames, and I was forced to write a dumb direct conversion utility instead.
We switched from Sourcegear's Vault (w/ Bugzilla) to Kiln (w/ FogBugz) last Fall. All of our developers love the tight integration of commits to code reviews to cases (bugs/tickets) to specs/requirements.
It took some trial and error to master the organization of the central repositories. Kiln (and Mercurial by proxy) is so flexible that you can easily construct an organizational structure that is either too simple or too complex. This is significantly mitigated by the ease with which you can branch and merge. Our goal was to construct a system which allowed only reviewed code into a staging repository which could then be deployed for release to QA. It took about 6 weeks (mostly to trial and error) to finalize our repository organization to streamline this process.
While in Vault (comparable to Subversion from a philosophical standpoint), you could easily commit a change which could cost hours of time reversing, in Kiln it is trivial to make changes and throw them away. While I can't speak for TFS, compiling for release in Vault was a nightmare. Take 90 minutes of productivity and trash it. In Kiln, it's trivial to write a few Perl scripts to automate build/release, which would now be almost instantaneous if not for a few minutes of manual review.
The biggest challenge (as Helgi suggests) is managing branches. Some developers find this extremely easy, others struggle with it.
There was no conversion path from Vault to Kiln either, so we maintain the Vault server instance for archive purposes and started fresh with Kiln.
6 months in, and it has changed our lives (for the better).
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Closed 5 years ago.
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We have used TFS2012 on the cloud and we don't like that there's no reporting service so we're looking to move to on-premise TFS2012. At the same time, we're starting to like Git and we're thinking that it may make more sense than TFS version control.
This obviously requires research and developers to "play admin" so we're taking the time to evaluate whether Jetbrains' highly-appraised solutions are a better fit.
Given a team of 6-8 people that run with Scrum that is eager to be on the "best practice" train for agile and a project that combines .NET technologies for the back-end and Javascript (AngularJS) on the front-end, considering a move from TFS2012 to a TeamCity/YouTrack/Git stack for scrum planning, source control, continuous integration and quality control and issue tracking:
What would/could we miss from TFS2012?
What are we going to enjoy from the new stack?
Is the new stack falling short in any respect that TFS is not and vice versa?
Note: This is a question specific to TFS2012 - there are several comparisons on SO and elsewhere for previous TFS versions and TeamCity, perhaps YouTrack too.
Here's a brief account of my two-week long experience with Git/YouTrack vs 6 months of TFS.
The new stack feels a lot more lightweight than TFS. Both installing (we tried the on-premise TFS shortly) and using TFS gives the sense of a very heavyweight enterprise suite for no reason. This is partially an illusion that the UI design gives but it seems that with YouTrack:
Takes less clicks to do anything and even less if you learn some shortcuts and how to use the commands.
It's easier to navigate between the views - there are less of them but give a better overview than TFS. This is not because they present more info - in most cases they present less info - but because they give the key information in a visually clean way.
The ability to run ad-hoc searches in YouTrack makes such a big difference! In TFS you have to create a query with a UI that tries to makes it easier but ends up making it harder for you than just typing the query params. I mean, we are developers after all.
I've enjoyed the local commits of Git and how pull requests work to integrate work from other people into a main branch vs merging on TFS.
TeamCity has also been very lightweight to use - though I have no experience with CI on TFS. Having said that, it's an area I didn't delve into much because I was already spending a lot of time managing TFS.
Hiccups and things that I miss from TFS:
It's a little harder to manage releases with YouTrack or I haven't figured out how to do it effectively. The management and separation of product backlog, release backlog and sprint backlog is easier on TFS.
There's no way to plan a sprint based on capacity of developers - I believe JetBrains is working on that though.
You gotta pay for a private Git - though YouTrack/TeamCity are free and full-featured for a few users.
I'll try and keep this up to date as I go.
My team is considering doing branch-per-task development in TFS 2010. We are thinking of using shelvesets for small tasks (1-3 days) and creating new branches for anything larger (4 days to 2 months). Once development is complete on the branch it will be merged to main and deleted (not destroyed). Typically it will be only one developer working on a particular branch.
Does anyone have experience working on a project using TFS 2010 with many branches. How did it work? Were there any server performance issues as the number of branches grew? Does it affect the performance of the VS IDE at all?
There are already many answers out there relating to questions such as "TFS sucks at merging and is crushing my soul, what can I do?" and "Why would anyone ever use TFS when x, y, and z are available?" Please try to keep your answers relating to server performance and usability of the system in the presence of a large number of branches.
Here is some background with my history of branching. The project I worked on previously used a branch-per-task strategy with ClearCase and it worked very well. Branch creation was tied to both the defect tracking and build system. Developers completed units of work each in their own branch. The lifetime of each branch varied from a day up to a couple of months. At the end of each task the code was merged into the main integration branch. This was a large project and after approximately 10 years of development the system has over 10,000 branches. ClearCase is able to handle this volume of branching quite well (except when viewing popular files in the Version Tree Browser, load time could be slow).
Basically the model you describe is a Branch by Feature, this is the model that the Dev Div of Microsoft uses to develop the Visual Studio product family, so you can tell it scales pretty well with TFS.
I recommend you to read this blog post and you can read the Branching Guide V2 to get more information.
As for the merging, the topic was pretty well covered here and on the web, in my opinion it doesn't suck when you use it correctly (and without the default merge tool).
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Closed 10 years ago.
Is there any online, editable, code base that can also compile the code?
This is more of an "I wish" than a question, since I've tried to find one with no success. It seems to me that there are a number of open-source, very popular systems which could be integrated for a great benefit to the open-source community.
An online collaborative tool, basically a wiki. Needs to have some versioning.
An IDE/SDK type tool - at a minimum just a syntax checker and compiler
If these two are combined, you would have an open source project that anyone contribute to. The way I see it working is like this:
Every wiki page is a single class
To update a class you must pass a syntax check, including not breaking any other classes that depend on this class
There are two kinds of users - administrators and contributors (who can be anonymous).
Administrators have to approve updates to classes before they can be included in a compile-able release. They also rate the changes that they "approve", which is a sort-of ranking system for the contributors. If security is a concern, you could say that every approved change is randomly assigned to another admin for approval, and if that person detects malicious code then the first approver is now suspect and may be removed from being an admin.
Contributors can download any approved release, and can optionally download a version that includes all of their own revisions that have not been approved yet. This is normally for their own testing, but maybe they just want to change a behavior, even if no one else likes that change.
Any class (that meets certain requirements) can be marked as a "root" class, which means it can be compiled with its dependencies.
The advantages with this system seem huge to me!
Participation with almost no effort. The work of joining an open-source project is normally at a minimum an hour or more. That is in addition to initially downloading and installing a compatible SDK tool.
Learning about open-source with much reduced effort. I see many more people joining in with a friendly, wikipedia style site that they can just browse through as a way of learning the code base
Better code base (refactoring) All those people who tweak wikipedia will be free to tweak source code too. Cleaner code will in turn be easier to read and maintain.
Easy customization If I want to add a feature to my favorite open-source software, I can just make a change and download the compiled version. No need to
This could be a build process for web servers. Plug this into updating a web-site, and it can replace your current build server. When a version is approved, it just deploys the update (presumably on a schedule so it is during low-usage hours)
I see a few down-sides, the same as those that already exist in wiki sites and open-source projects, somewhat amplified. But I think these all have somewhat standard
Public/anonymous contributions could be bad or malicious
Blocking "spam" contributions
Bandwidth of downloads (all those executable files)
CPU to compile all the versions
Does any such thing exists? If not, how feasible would it be for a team to put this together? Are there any other major problems that could kill this idea?
This idea just occurred to me one day, and I can't find it. I'm putting this "out there" partially to "establish prior art". This idea is free to be taken and used, just not free to be patented :p.
Perhaps you're looking for Cloud9 IDE?
From their website:
Cloud9 IDE is an online development environment for Javascript and Node.js applications as well as HTML, CSS, PHP, Java, Ruby and 23 other languages... Teams can collaborate on projects and run them within the browser. When you're finished, deploy it—and you're done!
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Closed 11 years ago.
I installed Team Foundation Server and migrated my code a year ago from VSS. It was a big mistake. Between workspaces, read-only flags, solution bindings and bad merge tools, I think I should have just stuck with VSS.
So, how do I migrate back to VSS from TFS?
VSS is the worst Version Control tool out there, please don't go back there. If TFS is really not your thing (and that's fair enough) then you should consider Subversion, or a DVCS such as Mercurial or git. If you like the simplicity of VSS then Sourcegear's "Vault" might be worth investigating. I've never used it in anger but it's very similar to VSS in layout and function, but it won't corrupt your code and die on it's arse if your repository goes over 2GB in size.
Another thing to note is that VSS is now out of mainstream support and wont be getting any more bug fixes or versions, from MS's point of view it's a dead product.
If you give some more detail then maybe someone can help you overcome the problems rather than going through the pain of migrating to another VCS?
For example the merge tools in TFS are a bit ropey but they can be replaced by just about any other tool on the market, I use SourceGear Diffmerge but there are plenty of others you can use.
I've never really had a problem with workspaces or solution bindings so without more information I can't really offer any help. As for Read Only flags, I assume you mean when you edit files outside of Visual Studio? If that's the case then the TFS power tools can be used to install Explorer integration which will let you do the most common version control tasks without having to wait for Visual Studio to warm up.
I think TFS is a much better Version Control tool than VSS but that's a pretty low bar to be honest. Of course YMMV :-) just please try to avoid VSS at all costs!
Disconnect from Source Control for TFS, and then add then re-add to VSS, though surely you can come up with a much better solution than VSS? Subversion, Git, Mercurial, Veracity?
VSS is end of life. Why not use Hg or Git?
You can use vss2git to convert your history to a git repo and worse case use Hg to port the repo to Hg.
TFS has some nice^H^H^H^ awful APIs into the source control system. You could write a program that:
N = 1
Checks out the source as at ChangeSet N from TFS
Checks it into VSS reusing the comment field
N++, Goto 1
You'd lose the time and user info, but at least you'll have your history.
Not sure how it would scale, but you could temporarily put it into MongoDB or queue it up using BizTalk. Then get multiple computers to do the checkin operations. If you have one per user, and have them adjust their clocks, you could preserve that info.
Or you could cut off your arm, both have the same result.
I am currently creating a business case for rolling out TFS 2010 as our source control and bug/release management tool.
We currently use OnTime for our bug tracking software and subversion for our SCM.
I was wondering what advantages TFS 2010 has over OnTime?
I have done some thinking so far and would love to hear responses:
TFS 2010 allows linking changesets->work items->builds
TFS 2010 provides greater customisation of workflow than OnTime
TFS 2010 is integrated into the Visual Studio IDE - This requires less apps to be open and less window flicking
Thanks in advance.
TFS is one of the least intuitive Version Control systems I have ever had the misfortune to have to use. It may have numerous "bullet point" advantages over OnTime (and other comparable systems), in terms of raw feature-lists and capabilities, but the key factor is whether it can fit in with your working processes.
My experience with TFS is that you will be required to adapt to the TFS way of working, because adapting TFS to your way of working will be impossible or too difficult to justify.
We recently reviewed a number of possible alternatives to replace a system comprising SVN and a manual bug-tracking system (Excel spreadsheets). On-Time was evaluated but deemed too expensive and complex.
In the end we opted to continue using SVN, but drastically revised (simplified) our repository structures and chose to combine SVN with the FogBugz issue tracking system. The integration between these two systems was fairly rudimentary "out-of-the-box", but required only a little effort on our part to achieve the much closer level of integration we desired. Certainly far LESS effort than my previous experience of a TFS roll-out involved.
Our SVN/FogBugz system is also now integrated with a FinalBuilder build automation suite.
The result is a system that not only fits our working practices perfectly (since we devised the means by which the systems would integrate to achieve that) but which is also infinitely adaptable as our working practices evolve.
I think that it really depends on the size of your team(s), and what you want out of source control.
I used bugzilla in combination with Perforce for a couple of years and found that both were really very good at their own individual things while working in a very small team (2-3 people), but the suffered from a lack of integration between them and from some little idiosyncrasies that took time to get used to.
I recently moved to a new job where TFS is used extensively. There are 4 main teams in this company with 10-12 developers in each, split into further project teams below that level, and it is in this kind of environment that TFS really shines imo. It's biggest advantages in my view are:
1) The integration with Visual Studio - it's not just a case of having less windows open, but it really does speed things up and make your life easier. Things like VS automatically checking out files for you as you work (no issues with accidental checkouts due to lockless editing), being able to synronise local + TFs builds, being able to quickly compare the local version against previous ones..yes you can get 3rd party plugins to integrate but none to this level and with the same stability.
2) The communication features - simple things like integraton with Live Messenger (provided you configure TFS correctly) are great for large teams. We use WLM to communicate accross the office and for collaboration as its just quicker than walking over to someone else every time you need to ask a quick question.
3) Linking builds/changelists to tasks - Yes other SCMs do this but again it's just done in a very nice, integrated fashion..I guess it's nothing special to TFS but personally I like how it tracks this.
4) Ease of merging/lockless editing. I've had experience with some other merge tools and the TFS one works nicely enough, making merging after concurrent editing pretty simple. It's very similar to perforce in this respect, but also with a usually pretty effective auto-merge tool which I use for tiny edits that I know cannot cause any potential issues with edits other developers are working on.
5) Auto building/build management. Working with a couple of large solutions containing 20-30 projects that depend on each other, this is a godsend. We have it set to queue up a build every 20 minutes IF something has changed, and when one has happened its listed in the history log..so easy to see when you need to update your local libraries.
I don't have any experience with configuring it other than build management, but I have heard that this is the worst part of TFS..that its a bit of a pain to get everything running correctly.
So, translating that to a business case..I'd say that if you are a Microsoft software house with large/multiple teams, then the time savings and productivity improvements that you will see as a result of the above features are worth the investment in setting it up. Its free to use in most cases as you will probably have a MSDN subscription (maybe some CAL issues but i'm not sure) so your biggest cost will be in user training and configuration.
Firstly, I would suggest to consider what is your primary concern, what is the problem that you are tying to solve by rolling out TFS.
In terms of version control I would recommend the blog post from Martin Fowler on Version Control Tools and a follow up results of a version control systems survey. Admittedly this might be and is a subjective view of the subject but one that seems to be pretty popular. TFS clearly looses in comparison to other Version Control Systems.
I currently work with TFS2008 and we have migrated from SourceSafe and IBM ClearCase/ClearQuest and there is no doubt that TFS is far better then any of the previous tool, still it has its serious shortcomings and the new version will only partially address those.
Addressing the individual point you have raised:
TFS allows to link builds with changesets and work items, but so many other systems
I have not used OnTime but the workflow customisation can be both an advantage and a hindrance. Potentially, there might be a lot of work involved in creating a custom process template and you would still need a sensible UI on top of it (Team Explorer or Web Access might not be sufficient)
Integration with Visual Studio is an advantage but there are add-ons to Visual Studio that allow integration with other source control providers
On the advantages of TFS I would probably mention
Distributed builds and separate build agents - if you do many builds
Full integration with Visual Studio via the Team Explorer
Extensive reporting infrastructure (though you can only take full advantage of it when using MSTest for all the testing)
SharePoint collaboration site for each project
Given the substantial cost of rolling out full TFS installation I would really consider what real business benefit would this solution give you that others don't.
Not shure about TFS, but the UI of OnTime is kind of non intuitive.
Also I dont like that you have different fields for Bugs and Tasks. Of course you can always add your own fields, but the default layout should be ready to use.
We endet up using only "Bugs" even if it is a task.
I dont say its a bad product, but if TFS has a better UI for bugtracking now (which it hadnt 4years ago when I had to use it and hated it ), then this would be an argument for TFS.
Sorry to hear that you want to get rid of SVN. Thats a hard decision.
I'm not sure about the licensing for the Axios OnTime but if you have an MSDN subscription then it's no additional cost. See the blog post here
I've been using TFS 2008 only for version control and while it's a nice upgrade from VSS some things that we're tyring to do aren't exactly in line with what is expected. That said, I've written a quick little web app that fills in those gaps. It was pretty easy to develop against using the API and there's lots of addons to help with specific tasks.
Probably not the answer you want to hear, but I'd be doing my damnedest to make a business case against TFS.
In any event, my general advice would be to try it out yourself (or in a small team) on some very small, but real project - maybe some tool you need on a once-off basis, code that can be thrown away or easily migrated to another system because it's small. There's nothing like actually using the system!
I have used OnTime and Subversion. I have not used TFS as bug tracker, but I've used it for source control. The source control part of it is basically still the bad old Visual SourceSafe. If you are currently using Subversion you will be swearing your head off any time you need to rename a file or, heaven forbid, delete a file and then create one with the same name - never mind any branching or merging. It's hard to convey in a post just how primitive and fragile it is as a source control system - that's why you really have to use it. You'll see what I mean when you find yourself stuck with a file you can neither check in nor delete and some meaningless error. Not that Subversion is perfect - but it's a decade ahead of VSS!
The workflow part of TFS, which I've only briefly played with, seems very "heavy" to me. That is, it really restricts the user to that workflow and requires a lot of steps that are often unnecessary. This stuff can help, but it can also just as easily get in the way. A good system provides the workflow when it's needed, but allows you to bypass it when it would just get in the way. When we used OnTime, we found that even its relatively unobtrusive workflow was often just more trouble than it was worth. Of course, this all depends on the specifics of your situation. How are you using OnTime workflows now and what do you want out of TFS that OnTime doesn't provide?
Linking changesets to bugs can be done with Subversion as well. It supports some extensibility mechanism - I don't remember the details, but FogBugz uses it (we switched to it after OnTime). Linking the to builds can be done by adding a simple svn tag command to your build script. Visual Studio integration can be done with VisualSVN.
The cost is also a huge downside of TFS. It is very expensive for what it does, especially when you take into account how well it does it. Yes, it's "free" if you have to have an MSDN subscription for every developer anyway - but do you have to, without TFS? Subversion is free, full stop. OnTime and FogBugz are far more reasonably priced.
I would strongly recommend against TFS. I once tried to restore the source code from a crashed instance, but I gave up after a few days, so source code was lost (= it failed to do the one thing a VCS should do). Of course, I might have done something wrong, but it's not easy to get everything right when the restore guide is two miles long, and it really is something that should happen so rarely that nobody is experienced with it.
Now I use Subversion/Trac, which gets the job done (and customizing the workflow in Trac is so easy it's not fun, compared to TFS).
For the time being, avoid TFS!
I would stick with SVN + FinalBuilder and then choose between FogBugz or CounterSoft Gemini.