TFS for the Masses!

Together with beta 2 of Visual Studio 2010, Microsoft released Team Foundation Server 2010 Beta 2 - Microsoft's team collaboration platform for team portals, version control, work-item tracking, build management, process guidance, and business intelligence. Previously, TFS required a very expensive license and as such was only affordable by larger companies.

However, the new 2010 release comes with a Basic license that enables smaller companies to start using TFS as well.

Personally, I think this is an excellent decision. I really like the feature set of TFS and have been looking at ways to start using it within the company I work for - Design IT, but its pricetag stopped me from doing so. Now, with the new release, anyone with a VS 2010 Professional with MSDN license can access TFS which no longer requires a separate license. In my case, this means that as soon as everyone in our development team is migrated to VS 2010, we can start using TFS.

Even cooler is the fact that you can now install TFS on a client OS like Windows Vista or Windows 7 as well, enabling you to set up your own private TFS server, for local development, or just to play around with it.

I downloaded and installed the beta 2 version of TFS yesterday and I am really impressed. The installation took less than 20 minutes and it worked right out the box. No more endlessly reading the documentation, setting up SQL Server or Sharepoint and spending countless hours on configuring security settings and searching support forums. The installation procedure literally was Next, Next, Finish. A wizard then guided me through a few important setup steps and then I was ready to go.

The Basic version of TFS supports Version Control, Bug Tracking and Build Automation (for continuous integration) and lacks more "enterprise" features like Sharepoint, Reporting capabilities and Lab Management.

For more information, check out the following links:

Obviously, since this is still a beta, anything in the post above might change before RTM, but so far, things look great.


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On Sunday, October 25, 2009 4:44:19 PM Anthony said:
Great article and this info is much appreciated. Gonna put this on Twitter! :-)

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Written byImar Spaanjaars
Date Posted10/25/2009 17:01