The Road to TFS - Experience from the Field (Part 1)

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In this post, I'll outline the TFS deployment project I've been working on over the last 2 months (as part of a dedicated team). Future posts will cover some of the bumps we've run into along the way.

Here's the story... The source for one of my customer's major applications lives in a single SourceSafe database that's grown to about 2.5GB. There are over 100 users of this database and a significant portion of them rely on it for most of their day-to-day work. There have been instances where it has become corrupted resulting in an outage and some nervous moments as it was restored from backup. To spice things up, some of the developers are located 400km away in Sydney.

Given that TFS has a fairly well documented migration path from VSS, maybe this is nothing special. We did however have to deal with a few complications:

  1. VS2003 is still being used for all development and that wasn't about to change.
  2. A central build server based on CruiseControl and NAnt is being used and was intimately linked to VSS.
  3. The security requirements are non-trivial and needed to be successfully mapped to TFS.

If any of this sounds familiar, you might be interested in my next post. There I'll talk about our approach to getting TFS to deliver on these requirements. We're actually going live this weekend, so by the end of the week, I'll also be able to comment whether we were successful.