Team Foundation Server (TFS) is a great enterprise-class source-control, collaboration and reporting system. Since its release in 2005, TFS has been knocked a little on its complexity and pricing. It has always been about “enterprise-class” and with that the requirements for the needs of enterprises provided a more complex solution that smaller teams couldn’t afford or administer.

The team behind TFS has finally addressed the concerns of smaller development shops with the announcement of TFS 2010 and its support for Basic installs.

What this means is…

• No requirement for SharePoint Services
• No requirement for SQL Server 2008 Reporting Services
• TFS 2010 can run on a local development machine running Vista or Windows 7 Home Premium and above
• TFS 2010 can run against SQL Express

The last piece of the puzzle is price. Although pricing hasn’t been announced yet, Brian Harry states on his blog that…

We’re not quite ready to announce the pricing and licensing for 2010 yet but I can tell you that it will be at least as easy and cost effective to get as SourceSafe has been.  Stay tuned for more info on this.

This effort is more then just providing a great solution for smaller development shops. Its a roadmap to get those shops to migrate off of Visual SourceSafe and into the modern source management era with TFS 2010.