TFS Woes
6/26/2008
Development
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At my current employ, we've got pretty much everything located in Team Foundation Server. It's nice having a central repository where you can find any files associated with any projects past, present and future (okay, maybe not future). I expecially like the version control / history stuff because it allows me to easily go back on code I've horribly managled. I'm not a big fan of how merging files is handled, but thankfully there hasn't been a need to do that very often and it's still better than just overwriting files with new ones.
As nice as it is having this in a central location, I found one major problem with that today. When there are problems with that central location (for instance, the server TFS is hosted on is down), you're put in a position where you really can't do anything. In my instance, I can't even work on non-code related things (like making sure database/class diagrams are up-to-date or making sure database scripts are in complience with our standard practices) because those are in TFS too.
I'm not sure what the best solution would be. If you seperate code and other items out of the central server so that you don't have one single fail-point, then you've made your day to day activities more conveluted. This is probably a too steep price to pay for the occasional outage. Assuming the outages are only occassional. On the hardware end you've got to do everything possible to keep the system up and running... RAID arrays, spare power supply, backup power, etc. We're probably not big enough to have a fail-over server ready, but certainly that would be a nice thing to have too.
I'm not too terribly worried about outages so far. Today was the first time I've noticed TFS down for any significant time in the past five months and the outage lasted for only an hour. Someone (not me, since I'm just a lowely developer) really must determine what occurred and make sure it doesn't happen again though, as a prolonged outage would leave a lot of people here with nothing do to for the duration and having people just sitting around isn't good for business, unless perhaps your business happens to be office chair testing.
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