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copied!<p>I'm part of a small team that's been using the Rational Team Concert (RTC; first version 2, and now version 3) Visual Studio 2010 client every day for about 9 months now.</p> <p>I agree w/ Benjamin's comments about vendor lock-in. The "lack of understanding or training" risk has manifested itself many times for us.</p> <p><strong>I strongly recommend against RTC's use for source control within Visual Studio</strong>, and any Visual Studio user with freedom to choose their source control tool should be able to find a suitable alternative without too much effort. The work item tracking/etc (non-source-control featureset) is nice, but here are some thoughts about its source control integration w/ VS2010.</p> <p>We've learned that RTC's "Pending Changes" pane is not trustworthy on its surface -- we must constantly (and manually) "refresh" the pane to learn what differences there <em>truly</em> are between our workstations and the repository. It's not uncommon that we share our work with the team, only to learn that some of the files were <em>not</em> sent to the repository (resulting in a broken build for the teammates), despite the 'Pending Changes' pane telling us that no changes were pending after we "delivered" (RTC's term for a "check-in") to the team.</p> <p>To make matters worse, this "Pending Changes" confusion has caused our team, multiple times, to lose code entirely. To whatever degree our ignorance or oversight caused these losses, we've not experienced them with alternative source control products. It regards the RTC client <em>thinking</em> we don't have any "Pending Changes" when we're accepting others' work (accepting another developer's change to a file that you've modified can overwrite your changes if RTC doesn't realize you've changed the file).</p> <p>The client's "Show History" and "Compare with Previous from Repository" offerings intermittently disable themselves in our context menus. In these moments, the manual workarounds required to see (or annotate) a file's revision history are laborious at best.</p> <p>If we have too many files modified on our workstation at any given time, the "Pending Changes" pane stops showing us a list of the files -- it instead shows a count. The number of concurrently modified files required to make this happen is in the hundreds (that's a large number, admittedly), and so it's fairly rare that we see this, but it's not unheard of for large refactorings in large codebases to impact this many files.</p> <p>These are defects around only one pane. Other behaviors around the source-control offerings of the client are buggy/unintuitive, as well.</p> <p>Generally, the RTC2 VS2010 client (most of my use time) offered a quality level I associate with a beta product. RTC3's VS2010 client (from which I made all of the above observations) is better, and brings new features (e.g. the ability to set a Current Work Item), but I wouldn't recommend it to any Visual Studio user with options who is choosing a source control product. It remains more buggy and consistently suspect.</p>

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