No history to Subversion
I’ve been involved in a couple of projects where SourceSafe was kicked out.
In most cases there were long discussions on how to handle the history in SourceSafe.
Most developers seems to manage without migrating the history, but there has always been a vocal minority that desperately want to have the history migrated.
When dealing with this it has struck me that every project that was in favor of migrating the history also was missing decent release practices.
The loudest arguments are usually that they often need to check what changed between two old versions when bugs are triaged. There are usually two reasons for this. The first is that someone has to be blamed for the error. The other is that they don’t really know when the feature was released in the first place.
My recommendation usually is to set up a working release management structure before migrating the source code to a new repository. Especially if the SourceSafe repository hasn’t crashed yet.
As far as I know there is no tool that can recreate the SourceSafe history in Subversion or Team Foundation Server for all edge cases. Especially since the notion of sharing doesn’t exist in SVN or TFS.
If you know of a good tool to get the history out of a SourceSafe repository please let me know.
Installing Team Explorer
… and it takes forever to merge the Help Index.
I just want to install the Team Explorer and do my stuff. Why do I have to wait an hour to merge the help index? In my opinion that should be done on a low priority thread after the install is done.
Working offline with Team Foundation Server
I’m just about done reading Professional Team Foundation Server
This tip needs the Team Foundation Power Tool (tfpt.exe) to work.
When you are working offline you just clear the read-only attribute on the files you want to edit. Later, when you are online, you open the command line, navigate to your workspace and run:
tfpt.exe online
Now the power tool will find all those writable files and create a change set from them.
Remember that you can not rename files while offline, but it is ok to add or remove files.
TFS:All files are up to date.
If you do a
tf.exe get filename.ext
and get All files are up to date. back, it might be because your current directory is not correctly mapped to a folder in the Team Foundation Server project your root folder is mapped to.
It your server ‘tree’ looks like this:
ProjectName
Source
ClientCode
...
ServerCode
...
…and your local folders look like this:
ProjectName
Source
ClientCode
...
ServerCode
...
TemporarySource
ClientCode
...
ServerCode
...
…then you will get All files are up to date. if you try to get files in the TemporarySource-tree.
This really bit me because I thought the return message meant that I had the current version of the file on disk, so when I tried a tf.exe checkout filename.ext and got TemporarySource\filename.exe could not be found in your workspace. I did a lot of swearing before I figured out I was in the wrong folder.
TFS Listener for logview4net
Howard van Rooijen has created a template for creating listeners to Team Foundation Server events. This might come in handy since I was thinking of creating a TFS Listener for logview4net.
I am about to separate the SQL and EventLog listeners to an assembly for MS listeners. A TFS Listener is exactly what that would need.
Add: Share and store documents… Free.
Unshelve files in TFS
If you are looking for your shelved changes in the Source Control Explorer you are out of luck.
There is a tool item in the Pending Changes windows for managing you shelved files.
Deleted files in a label, TFS
According to this article from the dev team deleted files are not left in a label. This might lead to some nasty surprises when you are in to restructuring your code base (as we are now). It is nice that we can get files from a specific point in time instead.
View others pending changes in TFS
Buck Hodges announces a plugin to Visual Studio 2005 that lets you see the pending changes of other developers in your team.
The plugin is here.
Cheat sheet for TF.exe
Here’s a nice roundup of commands for TF.exe
TFS Server with friendly DNS name
Since I didn’t find this info the first time I searched I’ll add it here to.
This is what you have to do to get the Team Explorer to work correctly if your TFS Server has a different DNS name than it’s machine name.
http://geekswithblogs.net/etiennetremblay/archive/2006/07/28/86542.aspx
…and what is really missing in that instruction is to disconnect/reconnect you project in Team Explorer since all URL’s are cached on the client.
