Over the weekend I had the time to work with Teamprise Explorer and Visual Studio Team Explorer while working on an open source project that I’m a part of. This was the first time I’ve worked with Teamprise explorer and Visual Studio Team Explorer. Since Codeplex houses its source on Team Foundation Server (TFS) I was required to use one of these options. This is a little look into my experience.
First off let me start by saying that I’m a Subversion junkie. I keep all of my own personal source code in Subversion and I’ve helped many clients implement Subversion in my time. I’m an avid user of TortoiseSVN because of its ease of use within Windows Explorer. Working with TFS was very similar to that of Subversion but the terminology was different and in my opinion Teamprise was a little more difficult to use. I originally wanted to use the Visual Studio Plug-in but I didn’t want to wait for the 246 MB file to download so I could install a plug-in. :\ Therefore, I went with Teamprise first. They will give you a free license to work with Codeplex if you’re working on a project, so that was a win/win for me.
Teamprise Explorer Client will allow you to connect to a Team Foundation Server to access source code (its user interface reminds of me of WinCvs quite a bit, yet a lot more polished than that of WinCvs). The only problem that I had with Teamprise is that when I went needed to edit the code I had to “Checkout for Edit”. If I did this on the entire directory tree such as my “src” directory it would log everything in edit mode. Therefore, when I went to upload the changes the entire source tree was being uploaded. NO BUENO. I know that on average I like to see what I’ve edited (yes, I’m used to TortoiseSVN) in some type of explorer window. This didn’t happen on Teamprise (maybe there is a way to see if a file has changed other than the Pending Changes window, if so, someone please let me know). In the end, I got frustrated, ended up clicking some button on Teamprise explorer and overwrote all my changes somehow. THAT SUCKS. I got frustrated and decided to download the plug-in and start working that way.
Visual Studio Team Explorer Plug-in was great. Its interface reminded me of the old days when I use to personally use Source Safe 6.0. The icons were similar and it was familiar ground. I think we may have a winner. After making my changes again I was able to easily see what changed through simple icon’s changing colors and I checked everything in really easily. It was very seamless. The only downside to Visual Studio Team Explorer is the install process. First you have download an IMG file, then download an install an IMG extractor and then open the IMG, then install. Only then did I get the full Visual Studio Integration. Very nice.
One downside that I see is that the Express SKU’s don’t allow plug-ins so this kind of sucks for those guys. How can you have an open source hosting site that doesn’t allow its users to easily get the source. Don’t get me wrong, they can use Teamprise but they have to know there is a learning curve with that. I didn’t have the patience for it this time around.
There is hope on the horizon though…
CodePlex will be offering TortoiseSVN Support to Team Foundation Server. Therefore you will be able to use a tool such as TortoiseSVN to access Team Foundation Server. Supposedly this is to be released on or around June 18th of this month. In a nutshell there will be a bridge built between SVN Commands and TFS commands. I would assume this is a good place for the Adapter pattern to be put to work.
Hopefully this comes to fruition, I can see a lot of people possibly moving their projects to CodePlex if that’s the case.
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