At our company, we have 5 developers that use Visual Studio 2008 Professional. We also still use an old version of SourceSafe (2005) - which seems to work fine with 2008.

I want to recommend upgrading both Visual Studio and our source control software. I gather the replacement for SourceSafe is Team Foundation Server. Can anyone help me figure out what I would need to purchase to get this working? I thought it was as simple as getting Visual Studio 2010 Pro upgrades for each developer, then some sort of Team Foundation Server component to install on our Windows Server.

If I look at Amazon.com as an example of a retail site, they sell the Visual Studio 2010 Pro upgrade for $549 US and have a chart of the features of different versions of VS 2010. It clearly shows that VS 2010 Pro supports Team Foundation Server.

However, looking at Microsoft's VS 2010 web site and going to the "Compare Visual Studio 2010 Editions", it shows two distinct versions of VS 2010 Pro - one "with MSDN Essentials" and one "with MSDN". This feature chart clearly shows that the less expensive VS 2010 Pro with MSDN Essentials does not support Team Foundation Server. I just don't get this. What the heck does an MSDN subscription have to do with TFS operability.

If we go with the more expensive VS 2010 with MSDN, it calls it a renewal, not an upgrade. Since we do not have MSDN subsriptions (beyond whatever VS 2008 came with), I guess we would not qualify for renewal pricing. Full price for VS 2010 with MSDN subscription is like $650 US more per seat than the $549 upgrade cost of VS 2010.

HELP!! I don't understand! I can see paying extra if we actually wanted full MSDN subscriptions. We don't. But we DO want version control of our code (check out a file to work on, check it in when done, etc). Should we just keep SourceSafe 2005? If not, do we have to pay more than double the price of a VS 2010 Pro Upgrade just to get a version that works with Team Foundation Server?

Finally, I am not familiar with what we would have to purchase for our Windows Server to get Team Foundation Server up and running.

Any help would be greatly appreciated!

Joel