I think this is a *little* overstated, but not by too much. I will state that I've been using Mercurial for my personal repos over a TFS master copy for almost a year at this point. Is it seamless? No, but it does work and lets me easily do the DVCS thing for myself (and coworkers who are similarly enlightened) and still keep the corporate overlords happy.
As far as the "check it in if read-only changes thing", that's not quite what happens. When you do a check in, yes, the file shows up in the checkin dialog, but the server will detect there's no actual change and actually remove the file from the changeset (and reset the read-only bit, which is a PITA). Branching always seemed to be just about the same as SVN to me, but I freely admit I didn't use branches much in SVN. I'd love to hear why you think it's so much worse than SVN. Blows chunks compared to Git or Mercurial? Absolutely. Yeah, completely agreed that server-side client state and workspaces are a huge PITA. -Chris From: [email protected] [mailto:[email protected]] On Behalf Of Jeff Schumacher Sent: Wednesday, January 26, 2011 12:27 PM To: [email protected] Subject: Re: My company just decided to implement Team Foundation Server, should I be concerned? Adding to what Scott said (all of which I've experience): 1) TFS maintains it's OWN list of what is on your file system. So if you have the latest version of c:\project\foo project from TFS, and then you delete foo using windows explorer, then tell TFS to get latest, it will NOT recognize that you have actually deleted the files off your filesystem and will report 'You already have the latest version'. At this point you have to force TFS to give you a specific version and tell it to overwrite everything on your disk 2) Using something like git or Mecurial with TFS as the central source is almost impossible. 3) TFS maintains state on files by inspecting their "read only" status. If you make a file writable, but do not actually change anything, TFS will think it has been changed and want you to check it in 4) It's just about impossible to have multiple copies of a repository on your computer. TFS expects that you will only ever need one copy of the code. It's idea of "workspaces" is nothing but friction 5) Branching is HARD in TFS. You cannot even compare it to SVN, let alone git or Mercurial. 6) It costs money. Subversion: free. git: free. mercurial: free. There's a small upfront learning curve cost, but they quickly pays themselvs off with so much less friction. I could go on. As someone who also "upgraded" (sideways graded is more like it) a company from VSS to TFS, I would say "FIGHT THE POWER!" I would never, ever do this again. Everyone I know that has ever used it, complains about TFS. There's a very good reason that we call TFS things like "Team Friction Server" or "Team Frustration Server" or "THAT F-ING SERVER!" On Wed, Jan 26, 2011 at 9:44 AM, Scott Koon <[email protected]> wrote: In my experience the main pain points surrounding TFS have been: 1) Weird file locking, sometimes TFS will tell me that I have the file locked when I don't. 2) Branching seems to be a heavyweight operation and that makes people hesitant to branch. 3) GUI is slow and the CLI tools still pop up GUI windows(?!) 4) The workflow is integrated. This might sound like a good thing, but in reality it means that people try to incorporate the default workflow into their business process and it never quite meets everyones needs. You can try to find different scrum/agile templates out there but they are kind of a pain to install and modify and again, don't quite meet your needs 5) People don't use shelves frequently enough. -- You received this message because you are subscribed to the Google Groups "Seattle area Alt.Net" group. To post to this group, send email to [email protected]. To unsubscribe from this group, send email to [email protected] <mailto:altnetseattle%[email protected]> . For more options, visit this group at http://groups.google.com/group/altnetseattle?hl=en. -- You received this message because you are subscribed to the Google Groups "Seattle area Alt.Net" group. To post to this group, send email to [email protected]. To unsubscribe from this group, send email to [email protected]. For more options, visit this group at http://groups.google.com/group/altnetseattle?hl=en. -- You received this message because you are subscribed to the Google Groups "Seattle area Alt.Net" group. To post to this group, send email to [email protected]. To unsubscribe from this group, send email to [email protected]. For more options, visit this group at http://groups.google.com/group/altnetseattle?hl=en.
