Team Foundation Server – Shelving Code in TFS

Both will do what you need. At my last job we started with SVN and moved to TFS later. Our team consisted of 8 developers and 3 QAs.

TFS was nice b/c it had built in VS support, built in ticket tracking, and you could lock files. We also used the SharePoint to keep track of all the documents and meeting notes for each project. It was a very nice and integrated....but it was also bloody expensive.

SVN was fine for our purposes though. That with a wiki and Jira and we were good. The only reason why we changed was b/c management decided we needed to be a Microsoft Shop.

I would say it's a nice tool if you can justify the cost and overhead. If not, you can't go wrong with SVN.

Here are some ways I have been able to accomplish similar tasks in TFS 2010 (Disclaimer: I haven't been able to try them in 2012 yet, and I'm not having luck finding 2012 documentation for this, so be careful and try them out in a test environment first):

• Write a TFS plugin (see http://blog.hinshelwood.com/team-foundation-server-2010-event-handling-with-subscribers/) - this involves dropping in some DLLs that are ran in-process with TFS. If you go this route make sure you handle all exceptions gracefully, and that your plugin doesn't take a long time to execute. Installing your own TFS plugin also takes down TFS for about 10 seconds while TFS loads your DLL(s).
• Write a plugin that triggers a job extension (see http://blogs.microsoft.co.il/blogs/assafstone/archive/2011/07/29/how-to-write-a-robust-tfs-server-plugin-with-job-extensions.aspx) - I have used this a few times to do some longer running tasks, as well as to do a consistency check over all work items. This also allows you to access the server-side TFS API (which is poorly documented, to the point that most people just use the Client API anyway. But if you can figure out how to use it, more power to you)
• Subscribe to TFS SOAP event for work items being changed (see http://www.ewaldhofman.nl/post/2010/08/02/How-to-use-WCF-to-subscribe-to-the-TFS-2010-Event-Service-rolling-up-hours.aspx) - this does not require any TFS downtime when you make changes, and doesn't take away from available processing power on your TFS server.

As for the OData, I have also been struggling for the last couple of days to get that built, and have had a similar difficulty with the Azure tools. The only reason I am trying to get OData to work is for accessing TFS from mobile devices, since the TFS client API DLLs aren't portable. Brian Keller (as of Oct 2011) says the following about the OData service (see http://blogs.msdn.com/b/briankel/archive/2011/10/26/odata-service-for-team-foundation-server-2010-v1.aspx):

• "Currently we have no plans to support true work item editing / creation"
• "I would like to continue to iterate on this and add value over time. I should make it clear, however, that this is not an official release from the TFS engineering team. The TFS engineering team has reviewed the service and approved of the approach we are taking, but there is no official support for this service"

I share your frustration about future-proofing. As of yet I have not seen any solution that won't need adjustment in the next iteration. The closest I have come is using the TFS Client API, since I have only noticed subtle differences between 2010 and 2012.