Frameworks: TFS Basic Profile -- Visual Studio Magazine

TFS Basic Profile Appeals to Smaller Shops

By Michael Desmond
11/01/2009

A few months back, VSM columnist Andrew Brust wrote about Microsoft moving away from building the type of products that fueled its early success ("Remembrance of Code Past," May 2009): That is, affordable, value-minded tools that prioritized productivity. As he wrote at the time:

"The very simplicity and productivity of classic VB, ASP and earlier data-access models is what made the Microsoft developer ecosystem so huge. As important and successful as .NET has been, the framework has pushed Microsoft to abandon much of that simplicity and de-prioritize the wants and needs of the developers who once flocked to it."

So I'm intrigued by a streamlined alternative to Visual Studio Team Foundation Server (TFS) called TFS Basic Profile. The tooling will work with Visual Studio Team System 2010 and promises to address the product's high cost and complex installation.

Matt Carter, director of Visual Studio product management, discussed TFS Basic Profile at the VSLive! conference in Orlando, and noted that the new product will appeal to developers who have stuck with Visual SourceSafe, Microsoft's venerable source code-management offering. Unlike server-based TFS, TFS Basic Profile will run on a Windows Vista or Windows 7 client box.

TFS Basic Profile should appeal to current Visual SourceSafe users, but will it lure back those who left for open source alternatives like CVS or Subversion? More important, might we expect a renewed focus by Microsoft on developers who value productivity over complexity? Drop me a line at [email protected].

About the Author

Michael Desmond is an editor and writer for 1105 Media's Enterprise Computing Group.

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