Why Use Hosted Team Foundation Server?

I thought I’d take a moment to answer a question that we’ve been fielding fairly frequently, which is why we’re offering a source control now.

As with most decisions, it just boiled down to timing.

Prior to Team Foundation Server 2010 being available for evaluation, we examined some alternative solutions that just didn’t live up to our expectations. The other source control systems that we took a look at were not intended for a shared hosting environment, were too complicated to administer as well as use and there was a substantial amount of overhead cost. We also wanted to have integration with Visual Studio.

With Team Foundation Server, while there were technical challenges, we were able to deploy servers into production relatively quickly, offer a product that was easier to use and with the new licensing model, not only are we able to offer the TFS Basic service at a reduced cost but as our first standalone SaaS offering as well.

So, why use Team Foundation Server Hosting?

Whether you’re a development company with several projects and developers or a one-man shop, the ability to maintain progress and focus during the application development cycle is absolutely critical. With Team Foundation Server handling source control, you gain the ability to document all revisions made to your project as well as the ability to assign various tasks through work items for complete organization. And with our SaaS solution, you don’t have to figure out and maintain a local TFS server on-premises.

Since the service integrates directly to the Visual Studio 2010 IDE and is backward compatible with previous versions of Visual Studio, there is no longer a need to install, maintain and launch several third-party applications or services for your source control and bug tracking needs.