Make my dev machine Team Foundation Server

Question

I am using TFS in my company. I want to use my personal computer to work as Team Foundation Server. I am using VS2012 Web Express. Can I do this?

Answer 1

The question is not "Can I do this?" . Of course you can, as it's just a couple of Windows Services and a SQL Server installation to store the data. You can install both on any supported OS.

The question is "Do I want to?" , and the answer to that is "No" .

You don't want to host your centralized version control server on a workstation. Think about hardware support, uptimes, monitoring, backups and so on.

If you mean you want to use TFS at home, where you have only one machine, then you can just install TFS Express and SQL Express. Aforementioned issues are then still valid. One power surge that kills your hard drive and all your code is gone. You can also look into hosted TFS, for example through Visual Studio Online .

Answer 2

Team Foundation Server is a server-class product which should run on a proper server environment, looking at both hardware and software aspects.

It can stand as the focal point of your software development lifecycle (requirements, code, builds, bugs, releases) and you probably don't want it to run on a workstation that is naturally more prone to crashes and security threats, and a with lower fault tolerance. Moreover, if running on your personal computer, it's also likely to have terrible performances, for example from a version control and build points of view (long build queues, etc.).

You didn't specify the size of your company, but even if it was made of a few people, all needing access to TFS, I would dedicate a separate server machine for that (physical or at least virtual). Another option, as suggested in another answer, would be to try Visual Studio Online and see if it fits your needs.

So, the short answer is "You can" , but in my opinion "You shouldn't" because of the aforementioned reasons.

Answer 3

Yes. Just install TFS and you're set