I recently played a bit around with Team Foundation Server and found out how great it is. Until now I used SVN for source control, Evely-Todo-Manager for Todo-Lists and Mantis for bugtracking. All of this works for itself but combining them is not funny. You have duplicate data all over your system and no real connection between the three.

Using TFS you have all those things (and even more if you want) in one central place and everything can be connected to each other. And you can access this all from within Visual Studio. Yes there is AnkhSVN and Evely has a VS plugin but accessing mantis from within VS is not as elegant as accessing TFS’ bug tracking.

However the biggest point are the checkin-policies. Checkin-Policies allow you to define rules your code must obey. For example you can specify that the code must compile without errors, that the code analysis finds no issues, that your unit tests run successful, or that there are comments for classes, methods, or things like that. This is a really great feature and I’m optimistic enough to say that these rules will make my code better

I don’t know but maybe I’m going to install TFS on my homeserver. Well let’s see.