My company is beginning to evaluate the new Visual Studio Team Foundation Server (TFS) 2008 software, and one of our big questions right now is whether TFS is a suitable product for handling project management needs for non .NET projects. My company has a mix of in-house developed applications, and 3rd party vendor applications that have been brought in. Therefore, having a platform-agnostic process tool is something that would be very handy (besides Microsoft Project, that is…).

From what I’ve read so far, TFS and Visual Studio Team System (VSTS) are intended to integrate well for .NET development projects. But what about projects surrounding a non-.NET project (for example, a vendor product)? There are still “work items” that need to be tracked, reports to be created, etc.; but perhaps only a subset (if any) of this work may require some type of .NET development.

Besides Visual Studio, I’ve seen that Work Items can be tracked with either Team Web Access or the Team Exploror application. I haven’t had a chance to test these out yet, but I’m curious whether managing a non-.NET project using just these tools is very… well, natural.

Perhaps TFS is not meant to be used as a platform-agnostic process tool (that wouldn’t be too much of a stretch!). Perhaps there are other process tools out there that work well with both Visual Studio and other IT-related projects.

I guess I’ll need to do some more digging…