Team Foundation Service!
If you want to try out the new capabilities of TFS try the new Team Foundation Service (TF Service) rather than Team Foundation Server (TFS).
For almost 8 years I’ve had my own Workgroup Version of TFS which permits up to 5 users. Now Microsoft has tfs.visualstudio.com that allows TFS in the cloud.
So I set up my version today and have the TFS server URL of https://karlz.visualstudio.com.
Very, very nice.
I still encourage the use of a Playground project at work, but the availability of TF Service to MSDN subscribers goes a long way toward providing an environment similar to work where you can practice code that should not be checked into the commercial software branch (likely Main) of your company’s source control.
TFS 2010 to TF Service 2012
Last night I finished migrating my source code from TFS 2010 to TF Service. I only migrated the source code using TFS Integration Platform. I’m ok losing the history of work items since this code is just mine. I wanted to use the new Scrum 2.0 template for my code so I didn’t want to worry about all the complexities of moving work items from the Agile 5.0 template to the Scrum 2.0 template. Here is a pretty good post for doing the migration: http://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/magazine/jj130558.aspx.
I would note, that I don’t like the fact you can’t edit the filters after the fact. I had to ignore the BuildTemplates in order to have the migration work properly.