Ok, so yesterday I posted about a few of the things that Microsoft got wrong when the released TFS.  I think it is only fair that today I list off a few things they got right.

1)      Attempt to package many different products into one.
One of the concepts I really like about TFS is the fact that all your tools for project tracking/management are contained in one package.  It is nice to be able to look at project tasks, bugs, reports, documents, source control, etc all in one spot.  In the past I have been on projects that used one tool for task management (Version One, Project, etc), one tool for bug tracking (bugzilla, elementool, etc) , another tool for document management (sharepoint) and finally a tool for source control (VSS, Vault, etc)

2)      Ease of use
TFS is pretty straight forward to use and setup.  There is a wizard to walk you through pretty much everything.  Then once you get the team project setup, working with work items, build, document or reports are simple and easy.  If you are familiar with using the .Net IDE, then using TFS should be second nature to you.

3)      Integrated into the IDE
The fact that as a developer I don’t have to leave my IDE to do anything is awesome.  No longer do I need to have 2-4 different applications running and taking up memory, I can just select the ‘Team Explorer’ pane and get to work

4)      New version of VSS
This may be the single best new feature that TFS provides.  Lets face it old VSS was a god awful product.  It was so bad that a whole industry of competing products was created.  They finally took VSS away from the old flat file DB format and started using SQL server as the data storage. 

They also added one really, really cool feature called Shelving.  This will allow a developer to check in a file without checking it into the main branch.

5)      Ability to extend TFS and add new features
As with most of their products TFS is able to be extended via add-ins.  One of the add-in we use at work is the SCRUM for TFS add-in (found here).  This allows scrum teams to use TFS in the way they are accustomed and alters the verbiage to follow standard SCRUM verbiage.