What are the issues we may face if we move from TFS to Fogbugz Kiln?
currently we are using TFS for source control, we are looking at the option to move to Kiln.
we are completely Microsoft development tools based company since we use Visual Studio .net, SQL server, TFS, Windows servers etc..
the reason for move it seems are:
has anyone already done this? does anyone know issues when we use visual studio with Kiln?
I cannot answer your question completely, as I don't use (and have never used) TFS. However, my employer uses StarTeam which is pretty typical as far as source code control.
For me moving from a traditional SCC method of check out/check in, to a distributed model was the first mental hurdle. To get over that hurdle I found that the tutorial at http://hginit.com/ was helpful.
As far as using Kiln for with VS, I use both the Kiln client (essentially TortoiseHg) and a plugin for VS 2010. I can commit, pull, push, etc. from both the Windows Explorer and from Visual Studio. I have had no issues, other than learning mercurial and how distributed version control works.
As far as other issues, the only ones I can think of are updating any build server or continuous integration servers to pull from the appropriate repositories.
Codereview exist in TFS (just download a free extension), merge is very good in TFS, reports are better in TFS, methodologies, integration, and even price. In my modest point of view. But both are great products, if you work or need distributed sc or mixed teams (linux, etc) also TFS has a solution, but is not so cheap
Branches are better in Mercurial, but this has a price: you're going to have much more branches, and it will be much easier for a developer to make a mistake and do something in a wrong branch. Flexibility may cause confusion.
But the most important thing is your transition plan. If you have a long commit record in TFS, you'd probably want to keep it. Unfortunately, there seemed to be no direct conversion tool to help converting TFS to Hg when I needed one. I tried using tfs2svn with hg convert, but tfs2svn got stuck with complex renames, and I was forced to write a dumb direct conversion utility instead.
We switched from Sourcegear's Vault (w/ Bugzilla) to Kiln (w/ FogBugz) last Fall. All of our developers love the tight integration of commits to code reviews to cases (bugs/tickets) to specs/requirements.
It took some trial and error to master the organization of the central repositories. Kiln (and Mercurial by proxy) is so flexible that you can easily construct an organizational structure that is either too simple or too complex. This is significantly mitigated by the ease with which you can branch and merge. Our goal was to construct a system which allowed only reviewed code into a staging repository which could then be deployed for release to QA. It took about 6 weeks (mostly to trial and error) to finalize our repository organization to streamline this process.
While in Vault (comparable to Subversion from a philosophical standpoint), you could easily commit a change which could cost hours of time reversing, in Kiln it is trivial to make changes and throw them away. While I can't speak for TFS, compiling for release in Vault was a nightmare. Take 90 minutes of productivity and trash it. In Kiln, it's trivial to write a few Perl scripts to automate build/release, which would now be almost instantaneous if not for a few minutes of manual review.
The biggest challenge (as Helgi suggests) is managing branches. Some developers find this extremely easy, others struggle with it.
There was no conversion path from Vault to Kiln either, so we maintain the Vault server instance for archive purposes and started fresh with Kiln.
6 months in, and it has changed our lives (for the better).
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