TFS Evaluation - thoughts

I've spent last couple of days evaluating TFS along with the Team Suite version of studio. Luckily, as a trainer, i have access to the MOC 2631 course, so I was able to actually test the stuff rather than just reading about it.

Prior to this, i've evaluated SourceSafe 2005 as well as Perforce - needless to say, SS doesn't match PF by any means. PF intergrates with VS quite nicely - it may not be as smooth as TFS (especially when it comes to solutions/projects), but still good enough to keep developer happy.

For testing, i evaluated NUnit. TFS offers much more that that though (code-coverage tests, load tests, etc.).

Here are couple of my thoughts:
1) TFS server is running for about $2700 if i'm not mistaken. The real killer is VS Team Edition. If you combine that with "Visual Studio Team Suite with MSDN Premium", you're looking at almost $20,000! Ouch. Compare that to "Visual Studio Professional Edition with MSDN Professional" for $2000... It already includes license for SS! Perforce is kind of pricey as well - $750 per user.

2) What i really like about VS-TS is the integration of work-items with everything (code changes, artifacts, builds, etc.) User logs a bug, you fix it in "myobject.cs" and when you check-in the file, you just link it with the bug work-item. This really kicks a$$.

3) I haven't had a chance to do a research on UI tools for work-items though. I hope there's something that would allow regular users to add/view work-items - and I sure hope it won't require CAL for each user!

4) Documentation. We all hate it, avoid it, fake it... I've tested couple of the diagramming tools in VS-TS and I have to say i was pleasantly surprised. As an architect, I can quickly draw top-level diagram, drill down to application diagram, code-generate from that to give it to the developers. Nothing impressive yet - get this, it propagates changes in the lower-level diagrams back to the upper level ones! Still need to play with this in some real-life scenarios, but so far very impressive.

5) Policies. Oh developers are gonna hate me now - I can actually FORCE them to TEST before they submit changes back to repository.

6) SharePoint site - i'm still kind of undecided on this one. I like the idea of sharing documents in SP for each project, having them version-controlled, etc. I just don't like SP and then I'm worried about maintenance...

Final words - so far, I'm inclining towards the TFS. Yes, it's very expensive, but if you need to put process around your app development and actually have a tool that helps, i think this is the way to go. Can you do all the stuff without it? Certainly yes, but expect to pay for some of the tools (Perforce, etc.) and don't expect them to communicate as seamlessly as TFS...

This FAQ may have some questions for you as well, plus many TFS links...