SCM Ramblings

It took a while to get it installed, but Team Foundation System 2010 is a pretty nice tool for the full development life cycle. It is still Beta and the install will remind you of that, but otherwise once it's running it works fine. My biggest complaints thus far are that in order to set up any additional users to the system you have to set rights and permissions in three separate systems: one for Sharepoint, one for SQL Reporting Services, and one for TFS itself. That's a pain!

I've favored the Borland products for so long, but they are starting to struggle as a company and I'm not really sure they will survive. They were just bought by a foreign company and I'm not sure they won't just dismantle their products and sell them off. Regardless, they failed to keep up with changes in the industry and somehow Microsoft did (I know! AMAZING!). Borland's products are expensive and frankly you can get better tools now for free (open source). I decided on the Microsoft tools because the company I work for is Gold Certified (and no I can't tell you who that is, [and if you do know, please don't post it here]) and thus much less expensive.

If I were strapped for cash I would use Subversion and Bugzilla for code and defects. I have no recomendation for Agile tools yet as I'm really just starting to examine those. The ones built into TFS aren't bad, but I am left wanting more. I really should make this a more formal comparison of tools, but that will have to wait until later. Currently there is no one reading this but me so rambling fits better now. I've decided that this blog should be somewhat journal eske at first and if it starts to get some traction then I'll make it a bit more organized.