From SourceSafe to Team Foundation Server

Question

Our team would like to move from the Visual SourceSafe (VSS) to the Team Foundation Server (TFS). I know that the TFS is much more than just a version control system, but for the first time I would like to use it this way.

Currently our projects are organized within the single solution that consists of the shared part (common library) and many customer projects.

Is there some kind of migration guide that would describe such a challenge? Or TFS enforces its own usage scenarios (versioning of projects, releases, etc.)?

Answer 1

TFS certainly has much more potential than just as a source repository, but it's quite understandable why you would want to migrate source control first.

The migration utility of choice is generally VSSConverter.exe which allows you to map VSS paths to Team Project source control paths and is pretty well documented in this walkthrough here.

There's another tool (TFS Migration and Synchronization Toolkit) available over on CodePlex, but when I compared the two, I determined that VSSConverter has been more widely used and I think is generally accepted as being the tool of choice for VSS migrations.

It seems there are a few more answers on this thread here also.

Now, the question I think you are really asking is more about guidance on creating Team Projects and structuring?

This is a little harder to answer without knowing more about your specific circumstance. Patterns and Practices published a book on CodePlex called the TFS Guide which might help - it describes amongst many things, a suggested Team Project source control structure. It might help in giving you some guidance around how to migrate and/or remap your solution structure.

Regards to versioning and branching, check out this site here on branching guidance - it's not a bad overview of some common branching/release management techniques using TFS.

If you get through all that reading, you'll really be on top of most of the essential TFS groundwork!

Answer 2

(Feel free to downvote me but...) If you're after better source control then TFS is IMHO overkill. I recommend you look into Subversion. VisualSVN is a superb ($49) plug-in to Visual Studio that works seamlessly alongside arguably the best SVN client TortoiseSVN. In addition they provide a free, easy to set up, Windows package of the Subversion server-side stuff called VisualSVN Server.

To learn all about the Subversion way of working there's the great Red Bean book.

(Not affiliated with VisualSVN, just a Subversion fanboy)

Answer 3

TFS and VSS are radically different beasts.

That said, the major problems with moving from VSS to TFS is generally in the developer's mind.

Check out the following blogs:

TFS from a VSS User's perspective: http://blogs.msdn.com/robcaron/archive/2006/10/29/901115.aspx

And of course, the original http://sstjean.blogspot.com/2006/10/document-from-vss-to-tfs-introduction.html

Answer 4

When we switched from Sourcesafe to TFS2005 the biggest hurdle were Sourcesafe's shared files, the "Get latest on checkout" approach and the branch/merge "support" in Sourcesafe. Everybody feared branching and merging in Sourcesafe and it took some time convincing all colleagues that it is not that bad with TFS.

We decided to not migrate files from Sourcesafe. We used TFS2005 for a new project and kept the old stuff in Sourcesafe. We didn't want to keep the project and folder structure which had grown over the years and was rather unorganized.

The old stuff is history now and we do all development work with TFS2008.