How to solve Microsoft TFS (Team Foundation Server) update problem and when you want to avoid TFS overriding option that requires much time.
Problem:
You want to update a location in TFS named $abc\code. You know that there is definitely an update in files in that location but for some TFS system limitation its not updating the proper file and showing that everything is updated. But in reality some files are not latest. This sometimes happens when we go back to an old snapshot in a virtual machine like Oracle VM virtual box. It may also happen is some other scenarios.
N.B. You might also face similar problem in "Azure DevOps Server".
A hard solution:
Update the $abc\code folder using TFS override option. In this case If update takes 2 days for example you have to keep you computer active for 2 days and cannot stop the process in the middle of it. Otherwise you have to do the full process again which will require another 2 days for example. Note that if the contents at $abc\code are not so large then this approach is the easiest.
An easy solution:
There is a TFS Workspace in the Visual Studio user interface shown as a drop-down. Delete the current workspace and create a new workspace with a different name such as Name_Year_Month_Day (for example "Workspace20200514").
When you create the new workspace set the TFS location exactly in the same directory as the previous workspace. If TFS asks you to update all then click "No" to cancel the immediate update.
Now take latest ("get latest") for $abc\code location.
In this case you can cancel the update anytime and shut down you computer and later you can take latest again. Taking latest second or third (or any number of) time will take only the remaining files those are not latest. It will not take the already updated files again. So, it will save time.
So, you can split you update into parts and your task becomes easy.
Related
I started using TFS since VS2010. By that time I already created my own TFS server (myname.visualstudio.com). My problem is that I created a new project on the my TFS website (the one with the dashboards). Then when I go to VS2017, and connect to that new project, it asks me to map and get it as expected. Instead of just clicking "Map & Get" button, I instead clicked advanced so that I can configure everything.
On the workspace configuration dialog, I noticed that VS names it as "MYPCBLABLA_1". If I try to remove the "_1", VS says that "the workspace blablabla already exists on computer blablabla", and does not let me use my existing workspace name.
Why does it do so? Can I not use only 1 workspace? From what I understand of workspaces, it is the container of my projects, so different workspace, different set of projects. But what are they really?
Additional info:
I don't know if this helps but on the past, I used to format my PC many times, I'm not sure if that affects the mappings or workspace names when I use VS after reformatting.
Workspaces are maybe the least well-understood feature in TFVC. And you are right in saying they're a way to isolate different sets of files from a TFVC repository.
A lot of people configure a new workspace for a specific project or set of solutions, but let's look at some of the ways workspaces can be used in detail:
Hotfixes: you may need to create a hotfix for something happening now, but you have pending changes in your existing workspace. Instead of shelving these changes, performing a "Get Specific version" on the bugged version, you can also create a new workspace in which to solve this particular problem. After completing the fix you can then continue working with the other workspace without needing to do anything.
Experiments: you may want to do some major refactoring, restructure source control or some other highly impactful operation. Doing this in a new (temporary) workspace helps you prevent messing up your normal work area.
Reviewing other peoples changes: When performing a review on another person's changes, you may want to have a local copy so you can run, annotate and play with the other person's code. Instead of taking these changes into your own workspace, you can easily bring these into a temporary workspace, which you can safely delete afterwards.
Performing a merge, while you are working on other changes: It may be the case that you're working on a new feature an already have some changes merged back to another branch when a release needs to be shipped. In order to prepare this release, without picking up changes or overwriting work in progress in your current workspace, it's often easier to perform these kinds of release activities in a temporary workspace, that way you know that the work is always done on the exact version in source control.
Preventing accidental changes to important branches: By putting your production branch in a separate workspace, you can't accidentally combine changes from say Development and Main into a single check-in. Since Visual Studio often auto-selects all pending changes in the workspace, this may cause unintended changes to your master/main branch. I've written a Check-in policy to prevent these issues, but having separate workspaces is a much safer solution.
Working with multiple developers on the same workstation/server: in some organisations, developers use a remote desktop to a central beefy server to do changes. To ensure each developer has his own set of files, each developer gets his/her own workspace. An alternative is to make the workspace public, which allows multiple developers to use the same workspace folder. But this often leads to all kinds of unexpected issues.
Browsing an old version of the code: if you need to review/compare an older version to a new one, you can often get away with the folder diff view in Visual Studio, but if you need to do more thorough comparisons, you may want to have 2 copies of the same folder in your TFVC repo. Creating two workspaces will allow you to have two different versions of the same folder on your local disk.
Prepare a special version for merges or labels: You can merge and label the workspace version of a set of files. You can create a workspace and then use Get Specific Version to fetch specific versions of specific files, these can all come from different changeset versions. Once you're satisfied, you can perform the label or merge or branch action to store this specific workspace version configuration on the server.
As you can see, Workspaces allow you to do parallel development on one machine, isolate changes etc.
Be creative
As you can see, workspaces are a very powerful concept. Usable for a lot of operations. But you need to understand the concept thoroughly. Many developers don't understand exactly what workspaces are and how they work, they're missing out of some of the most powerful concepts of TFVC.
Consolidating and cleaning up
In your case you now have two workspaces. In order to consolidate these (if you want to), you can unmap the folders from your _1 folder and then map these same folders in your original workspace. You can also delete the _1 workspace from the TFS Server and then update the mappings of the original workspace.
Remember that workspaces are stored on your local machine, but that the TFS server also has a registry of who mapped which TFVC folders to which workstations. So simply deleting files from your local disk is not sufficient. You need to save these changes to the TFS server (this happens automatically after performing a get operation after changing the mappings).
To check which workspaces are registered to your workstation on the TFS server, use:
tf vc workspaces /computer:YOURWORKSTATIONNAME
Then delete old workspaces with
// DELETE the local workspace
tf vc workspace /delete:WORKSPACENAME
// DELETE the workspace registration on the TFS server
tf vc workspaces /remove:WORKSPACENAME
To prevent the creation of a new workspace by VS, I:
Create a local folder to which I’ll map the content of the remote repository;
In VS, connect to the remote repository;
In VS, open Source Control Explorer and navigate to the content I need; VS will show a “not mapped message”.
Click on that message and map locally.
This guarantees that no other workspace will be created, and the current one will be used.
As usual I extensively searched for a solution before asking here, I'm really stuck.
I'm currently working on a customer TFS server and I have no administration rights whatsoever. Me and a colleague were using the same user account, which I know is a bad practice but again I had no choice here.
Today we found out that the account is expired and the customer is saying that it will not be reactivated. Instead they gave us a new account.
The problem is that in our local workspaces we had some uncommited changes. I'm trying to find a way to reassing the local workspace to a different user but every path I tried leads to a dead end.
One thing I tried was to access the current workspace and set it to "Public" so another user can work on it, but I can't access the current workspace as I am offline and the user is expired.
If I change TFS credentials and try to Get Latest Version or anything else I don't see the old workspace but only the workspace(s) of the new user, which has no "Use" access to my local workspace.
I also read that a manual merge of the changes (using KDiff or Winmerge) is discouraged as TFS doesn't see edits done outside VS so it wouldn't know the files have been modified. I personally noted this behaviour when I tried to change some nodes in .csproj files with Notepad++ and TFS didn't give me the file in the pending changes.
Anyone knows the proper way to work with a new user without losing the local changes?
Thanks.
1)Create a branch for the latest change set from the server
2) Check out the files to your workspace
3) Overwrite the files in worspace
4) Now the branch contains your changes
5) Merge the branch which contains your chnages with the latest.
You have three options:
If you are using TFS 2012+ and VS 2012+ you can create a new workspace as the new user and make it a 'local' workspace rather than a server workspace. Then just drop the changes in a VS will detect them.
If you are using an old version of TFS and/or VS you can use the 'go online' option (2010 only)
If you are using a really old version you may need to checkout the entire workspace before dropping the changes back in.
Update: In order to achieve a merge of the changes you could create a branch from the last/latest changeset that you 'got' from the server. Then just overwrite you files... You now have a branch with just your changes and you can then user the merge tool to stitch it back together.
note: Also note that you should check in code frequently (at least daily) to avoid this issue in the first place.
We have multiple developers on our team. This works for everyone except one developer, but we cannot seem to find the reason it does not work for this individual. We all have VS premium+, TFS 2012 power tools installed.
We have a branch. We get latest version from branch. Go to windows explorer and delete all files in folder "sdk" (there exist no subdirectories in sdk/). Then we copy into it a bunch of files. (This effectively leaves some files as new files, updated files, identical files or removed files when compared with what was deleted.)
When we go to pending changes, these changes show up under "Excluded Changes - Add(s) 51, Deletes(3)".
Except for one developer. His system does not recognize these changes. What might cause this to not work for him?
If it helps troubleshoot, he is also the only developer that if he were to delete these files via power tools delete option in windows explorer, his .dll files get locked. This does not happen for anyone else either.
This is what we've checked so far:
EDIT: Solution Found - Thank you all for the responses! It was indeed the local vs server workspace option. Setting his workspace to local solved these and a few other issue he was apparently having.
Make sure that the developer is using a "Local Workspace" as opposed to the "Server Workspace".
This is a concept which was introduced in TFS 2012 which helps developers to work offline as opposed to server workspace in earlier versions which did not allow that. TFS 2012 changes up the workspace options. Server workspaces are still available, and work exactly has they have in previous versions. However, TFS 2012 now contains a new type of workspace, called a Local workspace. Again, this is an oversimplification, but in a Local workspace, all the files are read/write, not read-only. The meta-data about the files is stored in a hidden folder in the root of the workspace, which allows edits, renames and deletes to be done locally without any communication to the server.
This improves the offline story with TFS significantly, as you no longer encounter issues with editing read-only files. It also makes it easier to work with other tools (such as Notepad) to edit code files. Making a change to a code file using Notepad will still mark that file as edited, which will be picked up by TFS the next time you connect.
LINK
This only ever happens when a user tampers with a local view of source control (be it a local workspace, or not). If all you ever did was get latest from TFS this would never occur, instead, the local view of what is in TFS would always be properly managed.
Also sounds like a bad merge, e.g. getting latest (where the files no longer exist) then copying in old content (introducing untracked files.) One thing you might try doing to correct the issue is doing a forced fetch from TFS after deleting the local workspace contents BEFORE attempting a merge. This will ensure that the local workspace is up to date an accurate with what the TFS server believes is truth, if it still occurs after merging in content then the problem is almost certainly within the merge process the user is going through (i.e. PEBKAC, or a knowledge gap about what they are doing.)
If you unshelve old content (pre-deletion) into the local workspace (where the deletions have already been performed, according to the SCC, and thus locally because of a sync/get-latest) then the unshelved files will effectively become untracked and it's up to the user to clean up the mess. This is identical to a user having copied loose files into their workspace that TFS never had any knowledge of. TFS isn't going to prune untracked files for you, I believe some other source control tools might do this as a configurable default, TFS does not.
That this is only happening to one developer in the team suggests that the other developers, one at a time, should sit with this developer and drive using "their process" to see if it still occurs for them. More often than not this comes down to a bad process a user has adopted, and putting a different person in the chair can help highlight why it has been occurring and help end it. A disciplined build/source manager and/or developer should not experience this problem.
Very interested in knowing what the problem turns out to be.
I got new working machine and because our TFS server is located very far from jobsites I want to avoid downloading all source codes again (several GBs) so want to move my old workspace to new one. I have copied all projects via LAN and Working folders list in Workspaces is empty in VS on new machine.
So how to move all items from old workspace to new one without adding them manually and downloading all the data again?
It's super easy to migrate your workspaces from an old machine, given your exact scenario. See this other thread on Stackoverflow:
Import Visual Studio TFS workspaces
Shelve everything in your workspace and unshelve it to the new computer. When you create the shelfset, make sure that "Preserve pending changes locally" is not checked.
This will, effectively move the workspace from one computer to another.
** Update based on question being updated **
I don't think there's an easy way for you to do what you are wanting to do within a workspace. Instead, you should be looking at the TFS Proxy. When you implement the proxy, it sits between your workstation and the TFS repository, and helps proxy gets, check-outs, and check-ins to help speed up your interaction with TFS.
I have a project stored in TFS Source Control (2008) that is being worked on by 2 developers. All 3 versions (Developer1, Developer2 and Server) are up to date with each other. However, both Developers report that some files in Solution Explorer say 'Checked out by someone else or in another place' - but the same files viewed in Source Control Explorer say they are available. It seems as though the workspaces have gotten confused but the actual files are 'good'.
Can anyone help?
I've had these lists get out of sync before. What was required was a "Force Get Latest" to refresh the statuses. To do that, you select "Get a specific version", and then select "Latest" and "Get file even if they already exist locally" (or some option like that). This will force the files to refresh, even if they're already up to date, and should also correct their status.
You would think VS/TFS would be smart enough to reconcile this on their own, but sometimes they just don't, for whatever reason.
If I check out the file and then do a "Undo pending changes" it goes back to normal. I think it's this bug, and it doesn't seem to be fixed in any patches or a future version yet.
http://social.msdn.microsoft.com/Forums/en-SG/tfsversioncontrol/thread/2a1c6a8c-0a2b-460c-9335-e31598f1107b
Go to File->Source Control->Workspaces in Visual Studio. Make sure that the devs you have only have 1 workspace. It's likely that someone has created multiple workspaces on his machine and have files checked out there.
TFS maps workspaces to locations on the machine they are created on so if someone pulled down code to multiple places and edited it, you can have one person with code checked out in multiple places.
Also, this link shows you how to see all the files checked out for a particular person.
But I also agree with Preet. It's perfectly OK to have the file checked out by more than one person in TFS. That's one of the minor improvements over SourceSafe.
Do you have SP1 installed? This fixed it for our team. If not, check if any of your devs have separate workspaces and may have checked out files to it
We had this problem when we upgraded from TFS 2005 to TFS 2008. There were problems with the upgrade that forced us to create a new virtual machine and restore/upgrade the 2005 database. We were under workgroup authentication and re-created local user accounts but since they all had new SIDs they were considered different accounts in some respects. All of the original users' workspaces hung around.
Take a look at the commandline tf and tfpt tools for manipulating workspaces, see if you have something orphaned. Attrice Team Foundation Sidekicks has a nice GUI workspaces manager too.
A bigger question. Why do you care if someone else has a file checked out? TFS supports multiple parallel checkouts on files. If you want exclusive control then use a lock.
Sorry to be clearer - I often find that the state in Solution explorer is not worth looking at. If I need a file I check it out. If someone's locked it then I have get told by TFS at that time, otherwise I just work with the file.