Why should my small .NET development company upgrade from Team Foundation Server 2008 to 2010?

Question

The company for which I work has an MSDN site license and upgrading to TFS 2010 from 2008 is not an expensive option. However, neither my colleagues nor I have been able to find any features that make this something we feel we need. Is anyone experienced with TFS 2010 enough to convince me that my company needs this?

To clarify: we have no intention of moving to a different source control product. The question is what features of TFS 2010 are worth an upgrade from TFS 2008?

Answer 1

disclaimer: I haven't moved to 2010 yet either, but probably will

Biggest feature for me: (we use branching to manage large feature sets and to separate SPs, QFE's, and major releases)

TFS 2010 will track changes across branches.
Example: suppose I change something in the Dev branch, and then you merge dev to main. Now suppose that someone uses the Annotate feature (on the main branch) to figure out who changed that code. In TFS 2008, it would report that you made the change (because you checked in the merge). Reportedly, TFS 2010 will be aware that I actually orginated the change in the dev branch, and it will be able to tell you that. That's gold if you are using branching.

Also, correct me if I'm wrong, but didn't they switch 2010 to use a single SQL database? (or maybe 1 for source control, and one warehouse?). If so, then the backup strategy gets a bit better. MS says that all of the TFS databases should be backed up from the same moment in time, but that's tough to do when there are 5-odd databases (it's very difficult to ensure that all of them reflect exactly the same point in time transactionally). If they have consolidated databases, then it should be easier.

One other: depending upon the level of MSDN that you have, TFS 2010 might be free for you now.