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Comment by sootzoo | Hacker News Reader

> Because tfs is dying. Why port over tooling for a source management system that is on it's deathbed?

[citation needed]

Visual Studio Online (which is pretty much TFS in the cloud) is alive and well. And improvements made to VSO have been shipping regularly as updates to accompanying TFS on-prem.

Are you confusing TFS with Team Foundation Version Control (TFVC)? TFVC is also pretty popular as a Visual SourceSafe replacement and has been very stable for us, though the recent support of Git in Visual Studio and TFS has us considering it as an alternate workflow for some smaller projects. I think the support of Git is great, but knowing MS (and what they've said through their usual surrogates) I don't think TFVC is going anywhere anytime soon.

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> Visual Studio Online (which is pretty much TFS in the cloud) is alive and well.

Visual Studio Online supports Git. So, no, it is not "TFS in the cloud." TFS and Visual Studio Online are very loosely coupled.

> Are you confusing TFS with Team Foundation Version Control (TFVC)?

I'm not confusing anything, I just picked one of Microsoft's many acronyms they use for it. Even Microsoft's own consultants call it "TFS" when talking about Visual Studio Team Services in Visual Studio Online. So if Microsoft's own consultants are "wrong" then I am in good company.

> I don't think TFVC is going anywhere anytime soon.

I do.

It doesn't work very well: it sends way WAY too many files up and down constantly, it has no concept of a pull request, offline mode sucks, branching/merging is expensive as all heck (inc. disk space, bandwidth, time, any metric), and even Microsoft's internal teams are utilising Git and Github.

I've used both on VS Online, no comparison, and Microsoft's own staff seem to agree. It is only a matter of "when" not "if" TFS will die and Git will take its place (although I suspect Perforce will survive on the Windows team within Microsoft).

There's a reason Git has taken over the world.

Again, you're citing the source control system as the primary feature. TFS is an entire application lifecycle management suite, not just version control. You seem to (continue to) ignore this. Its closest analogue is probably the entire Atlassian family of products.

On TFVC:

> it sends way WAY too many files up and down constantly

It sends literally zero files anywhere until you interact with the server, as any sane server-based version control system would do. I don't know about your workflow but I don't know what you consider a reasonable amount of I/O to sync a workspace. You can elect "Local" workspaces since around TFS 2012 which can work completely disconnected if you choose.

> branching/merging is expensive as all heck

It's folder-based branching and can be done very quickly/cheaply if you don't store your entire company in source control. And how well does Git handle large files? Git is opinionated on branches and creates them cheaply/quickly; TFVC evolved from CVS-type systems where this was not the prevailing mindset, but again I don't know what you're considering "expensive." Maybe where you work?

> even Microsoft's internal teams are utilising Git and Github

Which isn't evidence of anything other than it's their current tool of choice. That has a lot less to do with future direction of their enterprise products than you're assuming here.

> Microsoft's own consultants

> Microsoft's internal teams

> the Windows team within Microsoft

Do you have insider info or are you just trying to sound like you do?

There are definitely some people who prefer to use TFS and some teams (like .NET) that are heavily invested in Git.

And yes, we call TFVC TFS all the time :)

TFS on premise also supports GIT.

VSO is literally TFS in the cloud. Once x feature comes out VSO, then it comes out in TFS a few months later.

I assume they have a shared code base.

You confusing TFS(ALM- CI, Code Review, Testing, etc) with just the source control component

Here is Brian Harry at MS on this very topic about a year ago: https://blogs.msdn.microsoft.com/bharry/2015/03/12/the-futur...

> "Most of our customers still use TFVC and we value this tremendously. Most people in Microsoft still use TFVC. Most new projects created today on VS Online choose TFVC."

Etc. It's quick and to the point, go read it. And again, has there been some sea-change at MS over the last year on source control? Quite possibly. But so far you've offered nothing but your opinion.

I think you're confused about what TFS is. I use tfs daily, but I don't use it for source control. I use git for that. Source control isn't even the main thing tfs does. TFSVC (the version control part) may be dying, but the rest of it seems pretty solid.

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