Microsoft Team Foundation Server Roadmap

SourceCodeControlServices, WorkItemTracking, Policy Support, Reporting, and ProjectManagement are all components of Team Foundation

The workflows, policies, process state information, and version control information have be stored somewhere and that somewhere is an SQL Server database.

Underpinning VSTS is 'Hatteras', the code name for a new from-the-ground-up source version control system based on SQL Server. It doesn't have a product name yet, and Source Code Control Services is rather long so Hatteras is it for now. SourceSafe's scaling and data integrity problems preclude it's use as a base for industrial strength applications.

New features include 'Shelving', which implements parking source on the server that's not ready to be checked in, providing backup for work in progress.

Microsoft's official whitepaper on how they plan to integrate Source Control and Work Item Tracking is a starting point.

More directly useful, there is a video which gives a reasonably good idea of how this will actually work. Work Item tracking provides the process support to guide a developer, ensuring that testing and other required steps (policies) get executed at the appropriate points and do not get overlooked, and that other team members are informed of progress. This is worth the few minutes it takes to download and run it.

Although this video is developer oriented it's fair to say that VSTS is aimed at a wider audience - see this article VSTS - Not Just for Developers by Bradley Jones. (Trim the link back to end at the ..7267). It's interesting that the Visual Team Foundation block graphic in this paper does not include a Version Control component, but this may be an early graphic.

Like any product in the pre-delivery stage there are more questions than hard answers at this point.

The interfaces to the TFS client are documented here.

Microsoft state that 'Source files and project metadata' are stored in the Microsoft SQL Server database'. Whether they've done the logical thing and defined the project/file structure data in XML is unknown.

The access interface between Visual Studio and Hatteras is implemented as a 'source control provider' ASP.NET Web service.

The ever popular, 'what'll it cost'? VSTS Pricing by Buck Hodges

Whether you want to or need to do this depends mostly on how evolved your organization is in terms of process management, and secondarily on how tightly you are prepared to bind your processes to the Microsoft way of doing things. (See the companion Microsoft Visual SourceSafe Roadmap article).

From a practical point of view of actually migrating, the first issue for most SourceSafe users is going to be whether TFS does sharing. And the answer, at this point anyway, appears to be no.

Check out this reference from Buck Hodge's weblog.

There's more detail on how TFS uses branching and merging to replace sharing and pinning at this link.

The official VSTS site is at this link, but for the immediate future, before we actually see beta's the best information source are the VSTS team members themselves.

Since we're focussed on the version control aspects of VSTS I'm limiting this list to team members engaged with source code control. The blog meme appears to have spread through the Microsoft culture and all these team members have blogs. The notes I've added are just a portion of the blog content.