Search code examples
visual-studiotfsdevopspipelinevisual-sourcesafe

Is TFS's source control just a beefed up VSS or is it significantly different?


My workplace is planning on moving to Team Foundation Server and it's not a moment too soon - anything to get away from the cancer that is Visual SourceSafe.

However, I must ask - is the source control in TFS significantly different (and better) than VSS or is it just a "beefed up" version of the same thing?

I ask this now since this is probably my last window to suggest something like Subversion.


Solution

  • We've been using TFS for the last 18 months, and like many products the first version left a bit to be desired (one of the favourites of TFS 2005 was not to get latest when it said it had, resulting in many build breaks).

    However now we're on TFS 2008 SP1 it works exceptionally well. The source control system is fast and intuitive, and integrates seamlessly with Visual Studio. For things like renaming, moving, branching and merging it easily surpasses other tools such as Subversion in terms of how well it tracks things and its ability to merge branches.

    In spite of what anybody says, there simply is no comparison between TFS source control and VSS. And you don't have to worry about your repository getting corrupted either!

    The only problem that still seems apparent is that every couple of weeks TFS slows down and getting latest takes ages, requiring a restart of the SQL Server to fix. I don't know why this is.