Microsoft technologies - Team Foundation Server - team system, 8 editions - oh my!

[WannaFly]

I do .NET development for a small department. There are 2 of us developers, we've used VS2003 extensively, have moved to VS2005 for a few projects, and now i'm considering 2008. We use visual source safe with for our source control - I haven't had any problems with it really, considering it's only two of us and we never need to branching or anything.

Noticing VS2008 can do multi-targetting (.NET2 or 3, etc), I'm tempted to move our 2.0 projects to VS2008. In my MSDN subscription, I can get "Visual Studio Team System 2008 Team Foundation Server Workgroup Edition (x86 and x64 WoW)" - which I believe is a replacement for VSS.

What I _really_ want is the code metrics, static analsysis,reports and all that of team system, but i dont think thats included in this. I can download VS2008 Professional, but it wont include that either, I believe.

So is TFS just a source safe replacement UNLESS you pair it with VSTS?

It's all very confusing - can anyone shed some light on the situation?

 

[imported_Dhaval00]

TFS is the name of all the "team-based" tools - source control, reporting, profiling, etc. - that can be used from within the VSTS edition of Visual Studio. TFS "could" be a replacement for VSS if it were cheaper - the major difference is VSS is file-based while TFS uses a SQL Server DB (which allows for SSRS-like reporting and SSIS-like profiling).

So again, if it makes sense, TFS is the back-end for VSTS. In my opinion, life is simpler and less cumbersome within the VSS realm. The team system does have some powerful tools if you can put them to proper use.

 

[Gunslinger08]

We moved from VSS to TFS about a year ago. More of a pain than it's worth, in my opinion. Would definitely be useful if we were interested in more than 10% of its features.