Can someone please answer a few Team Explorer Integration questions to a completely lost developer?

Question

I am investigating source control options for our company projects. I am familiar with Subversion, however I have also decided to investigate and compare it to Team Foundation Server.

I have Team Foundation Server 2010 installed on a development server, and have installed Team Explorer (all 2 gigs of it, it's not exactly a lightweight client install) on my laptop. With a little bit of experimentation and research, I am scratching my head over some unanswered questions:

1) Are projects only managed (branched, tagged, merged, etc) through Visual Studios? I.E there is no lightweight client that allows you to simply check something out of the repository (similar to Tortoise for Subversion, or the Visual Source Safe client for VSS)

2) It would appear that you cannot connect to TFS2010 with VS2008 or VS2005. Is that correct? Is it a general expectation that all developers use the latest version of Visual Studios

3) If TFS projects are indeed managed through Visual Studios, how do you then manage non Microsoft files? These include, but aren't limited to examples such as SQL Scripts, Java Classes, XML Files or Project Documentation

4) I realise that this question may be a bit ambiguous, however in general if we are not a company who specifically develop with Microsoft products (it varies depening on the projcet), is it likely that subversion may be a better alternative, given it's not product specific

Any replies would be greatly appreciated.

Answer 1

Hopefully this wil help.

1) Kind of, Team Explorer is a plugin for VS, If you don't have VS installed then Team Explorer will install a VS shell and then plug in to that. You can manage TFS from the command line using the tf command, which is installed as part of Team Explorer. You can also install the TFS power tools, This will add additional command line tools and allow you to add Windows Explorer integration, you can then check in / out from windows explorer.

2) You can connect to TFS 2010 from VS 2005 / 2008 you need to install the relevant version of team explorer, plus you need to install the forward compatability update (2005 / 2008). You can also use the TFS MSSCCI Provider which adds some integration to other products such as VS 2003. In essence the MSSCCI Provider pretends to be VSS.

3) You can manage non MS stuff via Visual Studio (think of it as a very fat client), or the command line, or with the explorer integration from power tools. A few non MS tools are supported by the MSSCCI Provider such as TOAD. If you use eclipse then you can also use Team Explorer Everywhere. In addition to this you could use SVN Bridge which will allow TortoiseSVN to connect to the TFS server (this might be the best option if your team are used to SVN).

4) I can't advise you on this really. If you're just using TFS for Source Control then I think there isn't much in it between TFS and SVN, although from a non-MS point of view SVN is probably better supported (although with the Team Explorer Everywhere stuff MS do seem to be serious about supporting non MS platforms). However TFS does a lot more than source control it's more of an ALM platform and if you think you'd use things like Work Item managenent, automated builds etc. Then it might be worth a try.

Good luck with your investigation.