Comparison of TFS and CVS

I am about to migrate my Java pr开发者_开发问答oject from CVS to TFS. I use eclipse IDE for development and I am unsure about the drawbacks of TFS over CVS. Please let me know if you know any.

---

TFS really works best with Visual Studio suite, anything else and you will find it to be quite a struggle.

• Eclipse doesn't really have any hooks into TFS unlike Visual Studio, so you will be struggling a little when it comes to checking in/out files (unless there is a plugin that I am not aware of)
• TFS is expensive. You need TFS server, and you need a client to access it (VS Team Edition and similar or Team Explorer)
• Also, you can't check out multiple branches/versions (from memory). You're stuck with 1 working directory that is managed by Team Explorer.

To be fair, TFS is a step up from CVS. But why stop there? Please look into 4th generation source control like Git, Mercurial (being the main 2) etc.

---

I'm assuming that you're moving to TFS beacuse it's already being used in your company. If you're a Java shop then there are probably better solutions (Such as Git or Mercurial). If you're also using Visual Studio then TFS will be an improvement over CVS.

You need to look at "Team Explorer Everywhere" This is a plugin for Eclipse that will allow you to use TFS. As far as I'm aware it's functionally equivilant to Team Explorer for Visual Studio.

In addition to this you can also use Team Build to call out to ANT or Maven using the "Team Foundation Server Build Extensions"

Be aware that you will need to have either an MSDN licence or a TFS CAL to use TFS. If you don;t have an MSDN licence then you'll probably have to pay for Team Explorer Everywhere.