Today marks the tenth anniversary of shipping TFS 2005, which was our first version. We shipped nearly six months late – VS 2005 shipped in November 2005. The product has evolved an incredible amount since then. The most infamous part of the first version was how hard it was to install (we completely rewrote our setup in TFS 2010).

We spent a little more than three years building the first version (I started as developer on TFVC in April 2003, and development had started just before that). There are a lot of products that never make it out the door – never make it to market – and lots of products that never survive ten years. While I’m really proud of what we accomplished with TFS 2005, I’m even happier about how the product has evolved over the years – how much better it has gotten with every release.

You can hear Brian talk about how TFS started and some of the challenges on Radio TFS.

Here’s some trivia for you. At the beginning we had code names for the parts of the product we started working on at the beginning. Version control was code named Hatteras, work item tracking was code named Currituck, and load testing (which became part of Visual Studio Team System) was called Ocracoke. All of the code names were from the North Carolina Outer Banks.

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