I am very encouraged by Brain Harry’s blog on dogfooding at Microsoft. In my battles to get my company to use Team Foundation Server I recently contacted the manager of the most highly regarded development team in the company.
Apart from being initially disheartened by his initial question “Does it run on Unix?” the manager of the team’s main reservation was that he is always dubious about a product from Microsoft that they do not use internally…
Obviously he has not had much exposure to TFS otherwise he would know that Microsoft now has 21 instances of TFS running for its internal development teams with a total of 734 projects and 5,600 users.
Now that is around 10% of all Microsoft employees, which is quite impressive for a product that has been out less than two years.
This internal use seams to be encouraging Microsoft to put a lot of effort into this product and Service Pack 1 was released within a year and version 2 (Orcas or Visual Studio 2008 Team Foundation Server) will be available by the end of this year, with version 3 ( Rosario or Visual Studio 20XX Team Foundation Server) to follow.
The future is bright, the future is Visual Studio Team System…
