We are a mostly MS shop at work doing .NET LOB development. We also use MS Dynamics for our CRM app... all the devs are currently using VS/SQL Server 2008. We also use VSS, but everyone hates it at work and that is quickly on its way out.
We are begining our initiative for TDD implementation across the team (~dozen ppl). I've gotten TeamCity setup and have my first automated builds running succesfully using the 2008 sln builder and also using SVN that a co-worker had setup who is doing the source control analysis. When demoing to managament, I think they started to buy into my snake oil and threw out the suggestions of looking into TFS.
This threw a wrench in what I had planned for our TDD architecture; In a good way though, because I had always assumed that TFS was just too expensive and not worth it for our team (and i've seen the same in other shops i've worked at / know of). I do feel like MS is years behind in the TDD/CI area and that the third party products were probably much better and more mature... I still need to do a lot of research, but I figured I'd come here to see if anyone has actually used both systems.
I realize the TFS encompasses a lot more then just a build server... but I didn't want to make this too broad of a question at least on purpose. What are the practical pros/cons of using TFS/TFB instead of TeamCity - e.g. which benefits would we lose/gain? Has anyone here actually used both systems (TFS for TDD/CI and TeamCity/SVN) and can speak from practical standpoint?
I've done some searching on this topic, and one post I found here on SO mentioned that the cons of TFB was it only supported MSBuild. I was planning on using FinalBuilder with TeamCity; and it appears it also supports TFS as well...
Thanks for any advice
EDIT: Has anyone used TFS as their Build/CI server and can tell of success/failure stories?
We are a small development shop, and decided that Team Foundation Server carries too much overhead for us. We used to write custom MSBuild scripts to run from the command line, but after we discovered TeamCity, we moved our entire build process over to it.
We've found TeamCity to be easy to use and configure, and JetBrains provides excellent support and documentation. They are also on a much faster release and update cycle than Microsoft.
Their support for SVN source control is excellent, and we like the fact that they support both MSTest and NUnit for unit testing.
We also liked the fact that the TeamCity Professional edition was free, so we could evaluate it to see if it worked for us. We haven't hit the number of project configurations (20) that would require us to upgrade to the Enterprise edition.
This question has a lot of good answers about TeamCity. It does not compare to TFS but it might shed some light on TeamCity for you.
I have used both, and I have had success with both, but TeamCity was so much easier. TeamCity was a breeze to set up and configure. TFS was not. TeamCity is rock solid, it's easy to maintain and it just plain works. The developers at JetBrains have done a great job responding to the community. They get a release out every 6 to 8 months that adds real value. TFS is on a 2 year or more cycle.
TeamCity gives you more choice in how you build and what source control you use. It's not all in one, but that's sometimes a good thing. It's got a good set of extension points as well. We have also been really happy with the agent model it has.
I've gone through 3 absolutely painles upgrades in TeamCity. The one TFS upgrade we did took our build and source control down for 3 days. I'm the admin for TeamCity on our project and it takes up a couple of hours a month. TFS took a couple of days a week.
TeamCity + SVN + VisualSVN has been the smoothest environment I have ever worked in. TFS was generally smooth on the day to day, but only if someone was there keeping it running.
Hope that helps
The benefits of TFS are one integrated environment that is supported by Microsoft. I personally do not like TFS for source control and have had a number of issues with it. It is clunky, however it had the benefit of having VS integration (which is also available in VisualSVN, but is not as robust).
Personally, I think you would be much better off using SVN/TeamCity. It is just easier to work with and behaves more as you would expect. As with most open source software, both are constantly evolving and will always have the latest and greatest feature before Microsoft. The integration between the 2 is really good and I have found no fatal flaws in the system. I constantly push to go this route in my current company (we use TFS), as I believe it is a much better workflow. As an added benefit, it is significantly cheaper than going the TFS route.
I have also used FinalBuilder with TFS - my question there is what are you really buying with FinalBuilder that you can't do with NANT/MSBuild? The answer at my shop is unfortunately very little IMO.
First off, see this post:
SVN vs. Team Foundation Server
As to your question about which environment better fosters TDD and such, my two cents is that the build management system matters much less than what's in the build file itself. Your Ant or MSBuild file should have the targets that do your testing. With MSBuild or Ant, you don't have to use MS's test suite. You can still use nUnit or whatever else you want. That means it doesn't matter if TFS is calling your MSBuild file, or if CruiseControl is, or if TeamCity is. The smarts are all in the build file and the tools you integrate with it.
My personal choice is not to get locked down into TFS's way of doing things, since you have a lot more freedom for a lot less cost with the wealth open-source testing tools that are out there. TFS is about to receive a major upgrade, as well. If you are going to go with TFS, my advice is to at least wait until 2010 is released. Concentrate on making your MSBuild files as good as they can be right now.
That being said, I must admit that TFS has one of the nicest build systems out there (2005 was terrible, 2008 was nice). Being able to easily customize notifications and the release process all inside .NET code was pretty cool -- you had a lot more central control over build and release policy than we did with CruiseControl.NET.
So I've used TFS and SVN/CCNet. I can't speak much to TeamCity. But IMO a build management system should be fairly agnostic to what is being built and how it's being built. For us, the extra control in the release management process that TFS brought us just wasn't enough of a bonus for us to justify the greatly increased administrative effort of a fully integrated TFS solution. Nor was it enough to justify the extra per-license cost of TFS, which can be significant.
The old TFS Build was XAML based and very cumbersome and and not nice to work with. That said, the new TFS 2015 build system is leaps and bounds better, and is script based with lots of web hooks and 3rd party integrations; very similar to Team City. Also, TFS now supports Git, so you are no longer confined to using Team Foundation Version Control (TFVC). Also, with TFS you can use your own on-prem installation, or can take advantage of a hosted solution through visualstudio.com. TFS is great because it's one completely integrated environment (work items, planning, builds, tests, deployments), whereas Team City is just a build solution. When this question was originally asked in 2010 I would've recommended Team City hands down. Now though, the 2 are very competitive. I would say that it would maybe boil down to if you want an all-in-one solution, then go with TFS, but if you are looking for purely just a build system, then Team City.
Comparing TeamCity to Visual Studio Team Services (the latest cloud-based offering from Microsoft):
Both work great for implementing a continuous integration process
TeamCity is more mature and everything just works.
Visual Studio Team Services by contrast is constantly evolving to catch up with TeamCity and some things just don't work well (e.g. try triggering builds based on paths that have changes from Git - the documentation is weak and the feature itself just doesn't work (as of August 2016))
Visual Studio Team Services makes it easy to have only cloud-based agents running your build (the downside however is that each has to do a clean pull of your repository for each build which may add a minute or more to the build). Both can also support local build agents which do not need to wipe the working directory for each fresh build.
But in either case I would highly recommend you also look at CakeBuild which moves most of the configuration information about how to do a build out of the CI system and into C# code that is in your Git repository along with all your other source code. With CakeBuild you can run the same build locally as you will run in the CI system and if you need to go back a month to build a specific version you have the source code and the build script to do it.
With CakeBuild in place you are now free to easily switch between TeamCity and Visual Studio Team Services.
The only downside to CakeBuild is that all your build steps are bundled into a single task in the CI system which makes reporting slightly less nice and may involve some extra work to get the test results out into a format that the CI reporting system can use.
MS is years behind in the TDD/CI area
Being one who has TDD'd for 4 years now you are correct. MS is still not even promoting it nor do they offer tools that work well with the TDD flow.
Don't get stuck dealing with Visual Studio for any kind of automation, source control, or agile workflow period (stop using TFS please!!). That stuff even though they say is "new" is monolithic and always comes with weird issues and bloat. It is always painful.
I've used Team City and it's simply amazing, things work, it's designed for usability, and it's simply designed well and compatible with most all test tools, etc. Fine use Visual Studio for code, nothing else. Look for external and open source tools to help build a better CI. The "you can do everything right in VS" sell is not selling, and it's not working. People nowdays are used to and always combining different tools from the outside to get things done. Relying on all MS toolsets is just not the way to go IMO for .NET. MS likes to sell "hey you can just do everything right here". But you end up with nothing but pain when you go that route and drink their koolade (TFS, MS Fakes, etc.).
If you plan on doing TDD, you definitely don't want to be using all MS tools. You'll either be pushed down "their way" of doing things which is often proprietary and/or bloated when you try to TDD with their tools or be totally restrictive. For TDD you need to be able to have some flexibility and choices when you decide to layer in different test frameworks, assertion libraries, etc.
Add Octopus on top of Team City, and it's stellar...you will simply fall in love with it as developer or for anyone doing DevOps.
Stop trying to rely on Microsofts continued failure at agile tool offerings
Start looking outside the box and try new things is what I keep repeating to the .NET world, me being a .NET developer in the past and who has tried new things outside the MS world.
Related
I am working for a company now for a couple of weeks. The build process is done mostly manually and takes several hours spread over several days. The languages in use are C#, COBOL, Delphi, Visual Basic 6, and of course the database with T-SQL. For the version control, we use Apache Subversion (SVN), except for COBOL code and the documentation, which is kept in Microsoft Visual SourceSafe (VSS). I have the idea to improve the process using a continuous delivery tool. Do you think that Jenkins would do the job?
Thank you for your reply.
Jenkins is undoubtedly a tool that can help with CI/CD.
Whether it is the right tool for your particular needs you should be able to determine by doing your own research into the capabilities of Jenkins and the tooling that it supports. You may find that you struggle with finding adequate support for the older technologies that you mention and you will likely find that you need to uplift some of that legacy to make it usefully available to any viable, modern CI/CD tool.
e.g. get your code out of SourceSafe. You should do that anyway because .. SourceSafe. :)
Don't get bogged down in how to migrate your history. Just shutter SourceSafe (make it read-only) to retain as a reference to your history and move tip/head into a new repo. (SVN if you have to, though I'd highly recommend Git).
More generally, I would be surprised if you could not find some immediate quick-win improvements that can be made, without needing to invest time/effort/money into a "Silver Bullet" tool, just by putting some scripting in place to automate current manual processes.
Jenkins is definitely the right tool. We use Jenkins as a CI tool for building our Delphi (+Dunit+Innosetup), C# and Cordova/PhoneGap applications (all code in SVN).
I have no idea of the dependencies between the code in SVN of VSS, but if it depends on each other, I would advise to put all the code in a SVN or GIT repository.
There are some simple examples to integrate Delphi in Jenkins, see the following links:
https://community.embarcadero.com/blogs/entry/continuous-integration-with-svn-jenkins-and-dunit-delphi-with-craig-chapman
http://www.ictexpertise.com/blog/2016/02/10/continuous-integration-of-delphi-project-with-jenkins/
http://chapmanworld.com/2015/01/18/use-radstudio-with-jenkins-no-plugin/
I assumed this would be easy, but I'm not finding anything on it...
I have a project in TFS 2010, which needs to be moved to a new TFS 2015 server. Apparently the project cannot simply be moved normally because it's using a different project template which is not compatible and causes errors when trying to migrate (so I'm told - I don't have any more details on this).
I'm looking for a way to bring over the changesets, keeping history, to the new server. I assumed there was some kind of "dump" where you could export the TFS changesets, then import them into the new server into an empty project - but I'm not finding that option.
TFS Integration is deprecated and apparently doesn't work for TFS2015, with no alternative listed.
I'm open to other creative options like temporarily exporting to a different version control system - for example, I've looked at SVNBridge, but I can't even get that working, let alone figure out if it would help here.
Is there a way to migrate all changesets for a given project and keep history, without migrating the entire project?
There is no default way to migrate changesets in TFS, you would need 3rd party tool, like OpsHub (some features are not free), to migrate the most commonly requested data. Check: http://www.opshub.com/products/opshub-visual-studio-migration-utility/
Or you may consider doing a upgrade from TFS 2010 to TFS 2015, which is a full data transfer. To understand factors that affect your upgrade's compexity, check the requirements and review the upgrade process.
Learn if a dry run makes sense for you, and weigh the benefits and the costs to perform a pre-production upgrade.
When you're ready to upgrade, minimize downtime with the TfsPreUpgrade tool - especially for very large TFS collection databases (> 1 TB). Follow these steps for how to upgrade TFS.
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Closed 10 years ago.
we are on the research level of choosing a full ALM system for our company.
we consider both TFS 2012 and JIRA for use in product, project managment, QA, support and developemnt teams departments.
the things to support are bug tracking, workflows, project graphs (such as bugs count, burn down and so on).
any recommendations? pricing?
as far as i can see TFS is better for R&D teams using visual studio and less for eclipse.
Here are TFS advantages:
TFS is an application life-cycle management (ALM) solution, but Jira is simply an issue tracker. Many features of TFS, e.g. source control and automatic builds are not supported in jira and you should use other solutions, e.g. Subversion or Bamboo to this aim.
All TFS components, i.e. source control, issue tracker, build automation are fully integrated. Such level of integration cannot be attained on other solutions.
It is fully integrated with Visual Studio.
Here are Jira (and other Atlasian Solutions) advantages:
It has been used in MANY open source projects, e.g. JBoss, Spring, etc.
For launching TFS, you need a high end server, MS SQL, etc. But Jira could be installed on an ordinary PC on open DBMSes, e.g. my SQL.
If you are using Java technologies, many Java IDEs, e.g. IntelliJ, Eclipse and Netbeans fully support Jira. I have not seen such a nice support for TFS.
There are lots of plug-ins available for Jira. You can take a look at them here.
If your team is small, Jira costs only $10. It is really cheap.
Atlasian solutions have better support for java technologies (Ant, Maven, junit, etc.)
I have worked with JIRA / Subversion and now with TFS 2010, and I think JIRA / Subversion are much better tools.
I like the idea of having source control, workitem control, build control, test control in one integrated package, but somehow TFS is just a below average implementation of everything (Except Gated Checkin because that is cool).
TFS version control uses binding just like VSS, so doing multiple checkouts of the same requires extra effort. The ability to Suspend/Resume work using TFS shelveset, is the official workaround for being able to do concurrent work.
TFS sometimes goes haywire with its SQL table locks, so it has be restarted. Also the SQL indexes randomly gets broken, so suddenly showing folder history takes minutes. TFS in VS2010 needs to be online all the time to do any source editing, though this has been fixed in VS2012. But the VS2012/VS2013 GUI is so tightly integrated with TFS, so if the TFS-server has issues, then everything becomes sluggish in VS. This is really visible with the new VS2015 CodeLens, where all TFS WorkItem Lookup should be disabled, or else VS2015 will get stuck more often than usual.
Visual Studio will one or two times during a work week fail to get latest source (sometimes silently). If you attempt to get latest again, then it will say you already have latest. When you perform a build, then it will ofcourse fail. The workaround is to perform a get specific version with forced overwrite.
To create a wiki for documentation, then one have SharePoint, and version 2010 is a really crappy wiki tool.
For some really strange reason Microsoft System Center (really expensive) is completely detached from the TFS solution, and lingers around like an old lady. Making it super difficult to synchronize incidents with TFS-workitems, and get TFS-builds deployed using System Center. VS2013 Update 4 now includes the almost free InCycles Release Management, that should make the continuous integration work better (IIS applications can use Web Deploy).
If you work with advanced stuff like release-branching, then you will be surprised how difficult it is to generate a release notes document (read requires unsupported 3rd party tools). There is no automatic association of Work Items when merging to release-branch. And if you suddenly want to release a new build, then no help around for creating a release-report that lists the changes/workitems that has been included since last released build.
The integration of JIRA/Subversion in Visual Studio (VisualSVN) is so much better (ankhsvn is an alternative opensource version of VisualSVN). Still don't understand why Tfs-annotate cannot jump to next previous version like Svn-blame can.
I have no idea about the difficulty of setting up TFS 2010/2012, but JIRA / Subversion / CruiseControl.NET was very easy and cheap (Guess one would now use Git and Jenkins that also supports Gated Checkin).
VS2012 also includes a redesign of the entire user interface, which includes a new "improved" TFS Team Explorer that is really a pain to work with as a developer (Compared to VS2010). Microsoft has declared that Team Explorer has been fixed in VS2013, but it is not true. It is mouse-click hell to perform checkin and associate tfs-workitems.
Visual Studio 2012 now includes a virtual kanban board, but I would be surprised that this feature is not added to JIRA.
Became very suprised when the Visual Studio Team announced that they will implement GIT support in Visual Studio 2012. Guess it is easier than trying to rewrite TFS into a distributed version control system. Hope the new GIT integration will come up to the standards of VisaulSVN.
We use JIRA and GreenHopper for all our development tasking, bug tracking, and product management needs. We have a team of 46 developers, testers, and management. It integrates fully with Eclipse. I highly recommend it.
The tasks and workflows are fully customizable, you can add fields, add automation (like assigning tasks to team members when the task changes state), support drag-and-drop attachments, and more.
The pricing on JIRA just dropped to a significantly for managed hosting.
Well this is basically about the tend in the market, IF you people working on open source technologies specially java , mostly professionals of java are familiar with JIRA, JIRA has almost all type of plugin for project management, SDLC, Code Review and Bug tracking. But if your people working on the .net or microsoft technologies than they are comfortable with TFS.
In general, if your project is built in Java (Or other Open Source), go with JIRA. If it's built on .NET technologies, go with TFS.
Theoretically you could use either one with Java or .NET, but the integration won't be as tight and you will have to use plugins to get everything working.
JIRA / Subversion / Bamboo are much more configurable and integrate with other open source tool with hooks and triggers. TFS does not allow integration with anything. It's not extendable. You can't improve it with modules or plug-ins or extensions. In my opinion, TSF is quite unexciting and dull, that is if you think of source control and change management as a necessary evil then TFS is for you but if you are in Configuration Management or a Build / Release Engineer, JIRA is the way to go.
Currently our build solution is set up using TFS + MS Build scripts.
TFS is also being used as a CI server.
I've seen several posts on this site telling people about other CI solutions.
Are there any compelling options to move to another Solution for our build system?
Or in other words what are we missing out on by using TFS?
EDIT
We are using TFS for source control / issue tracking and I think this is a good solution, im just wondering about the other options for build server / CI server integrating with TFS.
The main problem with TFS is that if you have a server crash, restoring your source code is non-trivial. This is unbelievably bad since the most important aspect of any source control system must be to be fail-resistent, at least if you perform all backups as you should.
IMHO the greatest benefit of TFS is that everything is integrated in the IDE: work items, bug tracking, CI, Code analysis, ...
I have used TFS in the past but my current company use SubVersion/Team City/FogBugz to implement the same functionality provided in the TFS solution.
I would say that from a technical implementation perspective, you can gain additional features from a non-TFS system that TFS would be a nightmare to configure.
However, that said, one of the biggest reasons for not going for TFS is the cost of running such a system. The big advantage of TFS is the integration of everything which makes people use it more as the more you put in, the more you get out. The worst case scenario is a system that people can’t be bothered using which adds no value to the company’s development.
In my opinion, if you are already on TFS and can afford to stick with do, do just that!
Our team would like to move from the Visual SourceSafe (VSS) to the Team Foundation Server (TFS). I know that the TFS is much more than just a version control system, but for the first time I would like to use it this way.
Currently our projects are organized within the single solution that consists of the shared part (common library) and many customer projects.
Is there some kind of migration guide that would describe such a challenge? Or TFS enforces its own usage scenarios (versioning of projects, releases, etc.)?
TFS certainly has much more potential than just as a source repository, but it's quite understandable why you would want to migrate source control first.
The migration utility of choice is generally VSSConverter.exe which allows you to map VSS paths to Team Project source control paths and is pretty well documented in this walkthrough here.
There's another tool (TFS Migration and Synchronization Toolkit) available over on CodePlex, but when I compared the two, I determined that VSSConverter has been more widely used and I think is generally accepted as being the tool of choice for VSS migrations.
It seems there are a few more answers on this thread here also.
Now, the question I think you are really asking is more about guidance on creating Team Projects and structuring?
This is a little harder to answer without knowing more about your specific circumstance. Patterns and Practices published a book on CodePlex called the TFS Guide which might help - it describes amongst many things, a suggested Team Project source control structure. It might help in giving you some guidance around how to migrate and/or remap your solution structure.
Regards to versioning and branching, check out this site here on branching guidance - it's not a bad overview of some common branching/release management techniques using TFS.
If you get through all that reading, you'll really be on top of most of the essential TFS groundwork!
(Feel free to downvote me but...) If you're after better source control then TFS is IMHO overkill. I recommend you look into Subversion. VisualSVN is a superb ($49) plug-in to Visual Studio that works seamlessly alongside arguably the best SVN client TortoiseSVN. In addition they provide a free, easy to set up, Windows package of the Subversion server-side stuff called VisualSVN Server.
To learn all about the Subversion way of working there's the great Red Bean book.
(Not affiliated with VisualSVN, just a Subversion fanboy)
TFS and VSS are radically different beasts.
That said, the major problems with moving from VSS to TFS is generally in the developer's mind.
Check out the following blogs:
TFS from a VSS User's perspective:
http://blogs.msdn.com/robcaron/archive/2006/10/29/901115.aspx
And of course, the original
http://sstjean.blogspot.com/2006/10/document-from-vss-to-tfs-introduction.html
When we switched from Sourcesafe to TFS2005 the biggest hurdle were Sourcesafe's shared files, the "Get latest on checkout" approach and the branch/merge "support" in Sourcesafe. Everybody feared branching and merging in Sourcesafe and it took some time convincing all colleagues that it is not that bad with TFS.
We decided to not migrate files from Sourcesafe. We used TFS2005 for a new project and kept the old stuff in Sourcesafe. We didn't want to keep the project and folder structure which had grown over the years and was rather unorganized.
The old stuff is history now and we do all development work with TFS2008.