Comment by jbergens
2 days ago
I was surprised that TFS was not mentioned in the story (at least not as far as I have read).
It should have existed around the same time and other parts of MS were using it. I think it was released around 2005 but MS probably had it internally earlier.
SLM (aka slime, shared file-system source code control system) was used in most of MS, aka systems & apps.
NT created (well not NT itself, IIRC, there was some an MS-internal developer tools group in charge)/moved to source depot since a shared file-system doesn't scale well to thousands of users. Especially if some file gets locked and you DoS the whole division.
Source depot became the SCCS of choice (outside of Dev Division).
Then git took over, and MS had to scale git to NT-size scale, and upstream many of the changes to git mainline.
Raymond Chen has a blog that mentions much of this - https://devblogs.microsoft.com/oldnewthing/20180122-00/?p=97...
TFS was used heavily by DevDiv, but as far as I know they never got perf to the point where Windows folk were satisfied with it on their monorepo.
It wasn't too bad for a centralized source control system tbh. Felt a lot like SVN reimagined through the prism of Microsoft's infamous NIH syndrome. I'm honestly not sure why anyone would use it over SVN unless you wanted their deep integration with Visual Studio.
After the initial TFS 1.0 hiccups, merging was way, way better than SVN. SVN didn't track anything about merges until 1.6. Even today git's handling of file names has nothing on TFS.