A brighter TFS future?


I saw an interesting quote in Brian Harry’s (the PM of TFS) post on TFS 11 enhancements. He mentions that the next TFS version will support Subversion-style “Modify-merge-commit” workflows, which is a definitely a step in the right direction. However, one quote popped out at me (emphasis mine):

I’m certain that about this time, I bunch of people are asking “but, did you implement DVCS”.  The answer is no, not yet.  You still can’t checkin while you are offline.  And you can’t do history or branch merges, etc.  Certain operations do still require you to be online.  You won’t get big long hangs – but rather nice error messages that tell you you need to be online.  DVCS is definitely in our future and this is a step in that direction but there’s another step yet to take.

Having worked with both centralized and distributed source control systems, DVCS is very plainly a better model of working. Good to know it’s at least on their radar, DVCS will open up a lot of branching scenarios that are just too painful in centralized models. Folks here at Headspring use SVN, Git, Mercurial and TFS, and it would be nice if at least 3 of those 4 supported a DVCS model.

Disruptive versus iterative change