As a response to Ben Scheirman’s post, Benjamin Day kindly apologized and summed up why he likes Visual Studio Team System and Team Foundation Server.
I am not going into the debate on whether it was right or wrong to delete that comment, because a lot of people already did that, and I agree with those who think that deleting the comment was kind of wrong. Calling it “unethical behaviour“, however, seems to be a little too harsh. Moderating news channels discussing politics in China is unethical – deleting a comment, because the blog author disagrees, is just weird and a little bit annoying.
Instead, I just wanted to chime in with my 2 cents on why I think Visual Studio Team System and Team Foundation Server are inferior, compared to ALL of the free alternatives that I know of – it’s because I believe in one of the finest principles of software engineering, which was coined by Edsger Dijkstra: Separation Of Concerns.
Separation Of Concerns can be low level, as in Uncle Bob’s single responsibility principle, or higher level as in service-orientation, or even higher level as in there’s NO WAY I’m gonna buy an oven, which insists on also being my washing machine and a pair of roller blades. No way!
This principle is so inherent in all the good disciplines of software engineering, heck in LIFE even, that I simply had to reply!
So I like to use CruiseControl, TeamCity, Subversion, Git, ReSharper, TestDriven, NUnit, xUnit.net, Jira, Redmine, Basecamp, MSBuild, Rake, NAnt etc. etc. because they let me switch each one of them out for anyone of the other whenever I feel like it. And, more importantly, whenever it fits the task better.
The fact that some of the tools are FREE and have their source code available for me to look at, is just an added plus. But the primary reason to use those tools is simply that they do one thing, and they are usually capable of doing that one thing better.
Hear hear! The only thing I like my phone to come bundled with is an alarm clock.