6 ms·

The CI and WebUI is eons better, not to mention just having git's diff-ing and conflict resolution (assuming you were referring to TFS proper and not git in TFS

by 0xfeba 9y ago

The CI and WebUI is eons better, not to mention just having git's diff-ing and conflict resolution (assuming you were referring to TFS proper and not git in TFS 2013+). We switched a large Nodejs project from TFS to GitLab and it's been night-and-day on our productivity.

sytse 9y ago
Wow, great to hear, thanks for sharing.
- 0xfeba 9y ago
  Keep in mind, we were trying to fit the round peg that is Nodejs in the square hole of Windows build environments. It was a kludge to begin with. Luckily we swayed management.
systems 9y ago
I am not sure what do you mean by TFS proper vs TFS 2013+ I meant TFS + Git , the lastest TFS is TFS 2017
- 0xfeba 9y ago
  Ok, you didn't specifically mention git in TFS so I assumed you meant TFVC.
- Sacho 9y ago
  I've only used VSTS, not TFS on premises, but my experience is that all the "cool" VSTS features(complex work items, custom queries, kanban boards, etc) I just don't find much of a use for. These features are focused on heavy management requirements for very large teams. I can get most of what I want from work items via github/gitlab label tagging, the custom queries are only useful if you actually use the complex features of the work items, and so on. Meanwhile, the critical feature for me is a easy-to-write and easy-to-read history of discussion on a work item. This is nascent in VSTS. The description and discussion blocks don't even support markdown; The description box has its own WYSIWYG editor, the discussion block barely supports linking to work items(but http links aren't recognized, which makes it awkward to link to e.g. the code or the wiki). File attachments go in a separate tab, so it's difficult to contextualize what part of the discussion they are for. Speaking of the wiki, it was just introduced and it's pretty basic. For some reason you can only place attachments in a single special directory, which makes editing it through the repo annoying - I want to colocate my pages and their images/attached files, like you would do normally... I also have some minor quibbles like the stupid iteration workflow(add iteration to project, go to team, select project iterations for team...talk about optimizing for the edge case). I think VSTS should really replicate the github/gitlab/etc issue description and discussion page. Past that, they seem to be pretty good at keeping feature parity(the pull requests are nice, the CI is okay).

by 0xfeba 9y ago

sytse 9y ago

Wow, great to hear, thanks for sharing.

0xfeba 9y ago
Keep in mind, we were trying to fit the round peg that is Nodejs in the square hole of Windows build environments. It was a kludge to begin with. Luckily we swayed management.

systems 9y ago

I am not sure what do you mean by TFS proper vs TFS 2013+ I meant TFS + Git , the lastest TFS is TFS 2017

0xfeba 9y ago
Ok, you didn't specifically mention git in TFS so I assumed you meant TFVC.
Sacho 9y ago
I've only used VSTS, not TFS on premises, but my experience is that all the "cool" VSTS features(complex work items, custom queries, kanban boards, etc) I just don't find much of a use for. These features are focused on heavy management requirements for very large teams. I can get most of what I want from work items via github/gitlab label tagging, the custom queries are only useful if you actually use the complex features of the work items, and so on. Meanwhile, the critical feature for me is a easy-to-write and easy-to-read history of discussion on a work item. This is nascent in VSTS. The description and discussion blocks don't even support markdown; The description box has its own WYSIWYG editor, the discussion block barely supports linking to work items(but http links aren't recognized, which makes it awkward to link to e.g. the code or the wiki). File attachments go in a separate tab, so it's difficult to contextualize what part of the discussion they are for. Speaking of the wiki, it was just introduced and it's pretty basic. For some reason you can only place attachments in a single special directory, which makes editing it through the repo annoying - I want to colocate my pages and their images/attached files, like you would do normally... I also have some minor quibbles like the stupid iteration workflow(add iteration to project, go to team, select project iterations for team...talk about optimizing for the edge case). I think VSTS should really replicate the github/gitlab/etc issue description and discussion page. Past that, they seem to be pretty good at keeping feature parity(the pull requests are nice, the CI is okay).