Team Foundation Server Express Edition

By Doug Holland (Intel) (245 posts) on April 6, 2009 at 1:40 pm

One of the great aspects of SourceSafe was that it could be installed upon a Windows client operating system such as Windows Vista or Windows 7.

With Team Foundation Server we have an excellent environment for team based development of larger projects. What should we do though with source code that is not related to larger projects?

What we really need is Team Foundation Server Express which would allow simple source control operations to be performed upon a single machine running a client operating system.

Ed Holloway provided some insight into how the installation of TFS was being simplified within TFS 2010. With version 2010, the only prerequisite that you'll need to have installed will be SQL Server 2008 which can be installed upon client operating systems.

Given this fact would we be able to install a minimal TFS instance upon a client operating system?

According to Brian Harry this is something the team is talking about doing in the future although it will not be possible to do so with TFS 2010.

I have today created a feedback item on Microsoft Connect to suggest that Microsoft creates an Express version of TFS and I would encourage you to vote on the suggestion, comment here on the suggestion, or ideally do both.

What kind of features would you need from TFS Express?

Personally, I'd like to be able to perform most of the operations that were previously possible with SourceSafe and that are supported within TFS today.

What kind of limitations would you consider appropriate for an Express instance of TFS?

Obviously the nature of the Express edition products is that they are limited to some degree compared to their full version counterparts. 

Given that there is already a Workgroup edition of TFS that supports up to five users, with an upgrade path to the full TFS, it would make sense that the Express edition would support a single user on a single client operating system. 

It should however be possible to upgrade the TFS Express instance to either the Workgroup or full editions of TFS should the need arise.

Given that source code is not the only artifacts often checked into source control it might make an excellent component to then become an integral component of a future Windows client. With Windows 8 it could then be possible to check-in and checkout Word documents and Excel spreadsheets, providing basic versioning at the file system level.

I've not even seen the release candidate build of Windows 7 and now I'm suggesting a feature for Windows 8, time to get back to work. Let me know what you think about a TFS Express or adding these features natively into the Windows operating system and remember to vote over on the Connect website.

Categories: Software Engineering

Comments (5)

April 8, 2009 1:24 PM PDT


Matt		 Are there any features from VSS that are NOT in TFS that you feel would be appropriate in an Express edition?
April 9, 2009 3:13 PM PDT

Doug Holland (Intel)
Doug Holland (Intel)Total Points:
13,765
Status Points:
13,765
Black Belt
 Hey Matt,

TFS seems to do everything that I need it to do from a developers perspective although the one area that SourceSafe really excelled was backup and restore.

I personally always installed SourceSafe into the C:\SourceSafe folder and to backup the SourceSafe database was simply a matter of adding it to a .zip file. Restoring the database meant simply installing a clean copy of SourceSafe on a fresh install of Windows and then unzipping the C:\SourceSafe folder over the fresh install.

Although TFS Express would be valuable without such ease of backup and restore it would be awesome if the backup and restore story really was an easy one.

Regards,

Doug
April 21, 2009 6:51 AM PDT


Daniel Biesiada		 Honestly, why to have team solution for a single developer even cut into some "express" form.
I realize that having versioned sources and history of these code base could be important for a single developer and his homebrew projects, yet little bit schizophrenic I presume if a single developer needs a source code repository management tool to maintain his own sources.
June 3, 2009 10:28 AM PDT

Doug Holland (Intel)
Doug Holland (Intel)Total Points:
13,765
Status Points:
13,765
Black Belt
 Hey Daniel,

It is often useful, even for a single developer, to manage the projects he is developing under some form of source control. Have you ever made some modifications to some code and introduced an issue but you've made so many changes you're not sure where the issue was introduced?

I personally like to check in and check out code very often, several times a day in many cases, and it would be nice to have that ability even on "homebrew" projects that I'm writing on a machine running a client OS.

- Doug
November 10, 2009 2:41 PM PST


Prabhash		 Hi,

I have used TFS and it is a great product.

Can you tell me which TFS version that I can install on standalone computer with minimum effort.

Is there any free download that I can try. please send me the link if any.

Thanks

Prabhash

Trackbacks (0)


Leave a comment  

To obtain technical support, please go to Software Support.
Name (required)*

Email (required; will not be displayed on this page)*

Your URL (optional)


Comment*