A Deleted Response to a TFS Blog Post
Monday, July 27 2009 65 Comments
Recently I read a blog post by an unnamed TFS MVP. In the post he claimed that TFS was a big win for small companies and started to outline costs. Roughly he said that with the available pricing options you could get adequate licenses for TFS, VSTS, etc. The figures ranged from $7k to roughly $40k.
My response, which is pasted below, was immediately deleted from his blog. Why? Quoting the email I received:
“No offense, but I deleted your comment. I make way too much $$ on Team System training & consulting to go publicly plugging alternative options.”
WOW. What a complete lack of integrity.
Rather that look out & learn from the broader software community to see what works well, let’s just stick our head in the sand & pretend they don’t exist!
If TFS MVPs won’t even engage to discuss about the product they spend the majority of their time in, what does that say about the product?
Here was my original comment:
I can honestly say I don't understand how you can feel this way.
I think if TFS was completely free you'd still have trouble getting small companies to adopt it. why? Because there are more mature tools available.
Git, SVN are far less friction tools for source control. They are easy to get started, 100% free. (Distributed workers being ever present these days, how long until the TFS team realizes that the central commanding server that locks your files is *not* a good approach to source control?)
Most people I've talked to don't like managing work items within Visual Studio (which has a horrible UX for filling out forms of data -- seriously a dropdown box that is 1600px wide? Gross) and TFS web access is only a small improvement.
Use something like Basecamp, Fogbugz, Unfuddle, whatever. They are very cheap, can integrate with your source control system, and are a joy to use.
Now let's talk continuous integration. TFS is also clearly not a leader here. Hudson, Cruise Control, and Team City (professional) are all free and superior. Team City literally takes a few minutes to set up. And guess what? It automatically picks up source from SVN or Git, and integrates natively with NUnit. MSTest? Nope, you need a hack for that.
Finally let's talk unit testing tools. MSTest has always lagged behind the other free testing frameworks. Why wait for the Microsoft mothership to come around and release a new version every couple of years when you can get the benefit of updates that keep up with the ever changing landscape of our profession?
The *only* thing I think TFS has a story for is integration. But when you integrate a bunch of mediocre tools, you get a mediocre solution.
So give me a $100k budget and I'll still choose mostly free tools.
His full response, name excluded:
“Hey, Ben -- long time, no talk.
Uhhhmmm...no offense but I deleted your comment. I make way too much $$ from Team System training and consulting to go publicly plugging alternative options. It'd be like me going to your blog and dumping on your ASP MVC book or NHibernate or something. As a consultant, I think you probably get the idea.
<grin />
Anyway, dude, you might be thinking about TFS2005 more than TFS2008. TFS2005 had some -- uhmmm -- 'issues'. A lot of the issues have been taken care of in 2008. In TFS2008 (and in 2005, although with more difficulty) you can do multiple checkout and there's a decent story for offline access, too. There is locking but, in 3 years of working with TFS, I don't think I've ever used it.
On the VSTS work item UI, yah...I hear ya. It's not as pretty as it could be. That's part of why I do a lot of my work item (bugs, tasks, etc) editing in Excel, or via TS Web Access. Where are you getting the 1600px wide dropdown box? That's just fn awful. There's gotta be a way to make that better -- change the UI control or something.
Why isn't TFS2008 good at continuous integration? Sure, in TFS2005 it was a hacky mess and you had to use 3rd party extensions (like the one I wrote) but in TFS2008, it works great out of the box.
You nailed why I like VSTS tho -- the integration. Why would I want to deal with multiple products from multiple vendors when I can deal with just one? For you and me, keeping those disparate servers/apps up and running isn't a huge deal but to a lot of organizations, it's a big pain in the ass...at a minimum it's a distraction. Sure it's free but it's a free distraction. (shrug)
Plus, there's the data warehouse on the back-end of TFS. TFS is constantly collecting all the data from your project plan, defects, builds, unit tests within the builds, code coverage within the builds and dumping them into a data warehouse. From there you can get comprehensive, up-to-the-minute (well, by default up-to-the-hour) intelligence about the status of your projects. This helps you to see what's going on on your project and (hopefully) expose when you're going off the rails.
Wait 'til VSTS2010 comes out!”
I think his response is perfectly valid. It opens the door to discuss the points. What frustrates me the most is the unwillingness to engage publicly.
Update: Ben Day responded here: http://blog.benday.com/archive/2009/07/27/23233.aspx
Tom Opgenorth
7.27.2009
9:32 AM
You'd think that if one was making tons of money of TFS they wouldn't be afraid of a little competition.