An Experiment in Scotch

Let’s say you’re rea­son­ably mechan­i­cally inclined and you decide that you’re going to start chang­ing your own oil in your car instead of tak­ing it down to the Kwiky Lube for their $50 spe­cial. So you go to Wal-mart, buy all the nec­es­sary items such as oil, fil­ter, ramps, pan for the old oil and some rags. You then set in to change the oil in your car. You drain the oil pan, take off the old oil fil­ter, put the new one one, close the oil pan and start to dump the new oil into the engine. About this time, a voice that sounds like God but is really Charl­ton Hes­ton begins to emanate from the bow­els of your car and tells you that the action you have just done requires you to get new tires. God (or Charl­ton Hes­ton) would then get in your car and drive it down to Fire­stone and have four new tires put on it with­out even ask­ing you to come along. Would that make any sense to you? Would you think that was just a tad pre­sump­tu­ous of old Charl­ton? Shouldn’t you have con­trol over actions that are com­pletely unrelated?

TFS (and by very close proxy, Microsoft) doesn’t think you should. Yes, the TFS rant con­tin­ues which is com­pletely mean­ing­less to 85% of my read­ers but it just dri­ves me insane. Get­ting lat­est should NEVER require a check­out of the solu­tion. These two actions are as unre­lated as chang­ing the oil in your car and get­ting new tires. You should be able to con­trol them inde­pen­dently and yet, here I sit with a checked out solu­tion that I’ll now have to undo because I have no idea why it checked itself out in the first place. This goes back to the tight inte­gra­tion between TFS and Visual Stu­dio and tight inte­gra­tion is almost always a bad thing (except to Microsoft who can then sell you more stuff — it’s really all about Microsoft any­way) but it’s infi­nitely more bad when it comes to source control.

As usual, TFS gets in the way. It’s a ham-handed attempt to steal mar­ket share from Ratio­nal and it’s just as painful to deal with. I never knew how awe­some Per­force and Sub­ver­sion were until now.