I am using TFS recently. I am developing an electron application. So while running my application, I am stori ng some data in my local workspace files . But I want to store this globally so that every others can also access it even before it is checked in. Something need to behave as global cache in TFS. So is there any solution for global caching in TFS?
It seems you have pending changes that are not ready for check in but you need to share them with another team member. If this is the case, you can create a shelveset by follow the steps below:
In the Pending Changes page of Team Explorer, make sure that the changes you want to shelve are listed in the Included Changes section.
Choose the Shelve link.
Type a name for the shelveset and choose the Shelve button.
Then other team members can find a shelveset and work with it.
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.
I work on a project that has a series of configuration files. From time to time, these files need to be updated with new properties or settings, or we update how content is stored in some of these fields. This means that we need to update these files to our project source control since we need to push these changes to all of the devs on this project, when these changes occur.
However, 95% of the time we want to ignore the changes in our local configs because they contain data-specific changes that are specific to a particular developer or his machine.
What I'd like to do within TFS is choose whether to commit the changes in these configuration files, or not, with each upload. Preferably, I'd never commit my personal changes (as they relate to my personal, localized data.) However, if I unstage this work, I can't switch branches until the changes are committed. If I undo the work, it's quite a pain to switch branches and then manually recreate all of those personal changes.
Is there away in TFS to store a set of changes, and when I update or switch my local branch, re-apply the changes to my local working set? Also, I don't need TFS to ignore these file-changes. Sometimes I do need to upload changes, especially when we're adding new config keys or changing the structure of the data. In such a case, I push up my file and everyone else will see the change in structure. However, if we can all apply localized patches to the specific regions/portions of the files with our user-specific code, it will save us a lot of time in re-integrating these files into our local, working projects. Can this be done?
According to your description, you could use shelvesets to handle the situation.
Since some of the pending changes that are not ready for check in, you could suspend your work and work on a different task/branch.
You can move your pending changes to a shelveset on the server and then clean your workspace. The shelveset saves and stores not only your file revisions, but also the Comment, the list of Related Work Items, and check-in notes (if you evaluate policies before shelving).
After the work have done, you could resume the shelveset to pending changes, unsheveset to local and keep working on it.
You could do this either from VS IDE or tf command line, more details please refer this tutorial: Suspend your work and manage your shelvesets
I'm new at TFS in Visual Studio and I want to understand something about Shelve and Undo.
Let guess I checked out some files, made some changes and then shelved them.
In that moment - the source code which was before I made changes is restore to original code so all the team members won't see my changes?
-- or --
they see the modified code until I Undo pending changes?
And if I undo the changes - will it affect my shelvset?
So you need to understand what is actually happening. When you make changes, they only exists on your machine until you check them in to the repository.
A shelveset provides a "safe" place for you to store your changes before you check them in.
The rest of the team won't see your changes until you check them in to the repository. So when you undo changes it is merely the changes that you made to your code that is on your machine.
In your example above, your team won't see any changes until you actually check it in.
Changes in Shelvesets can be seen by the other team members, but they are not committed to the repository. They would have to go to Pending Changes -> Actions -> Find Shelveset and type you name in the user search box.
Only when you do a check-in, will others see your changes in the repository.
Undo will remove the changes locally, but the shelveset will remain so that you or anyone on the team can get the changes back locally.
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.
There are some files in my team's solution that almost never need to be checked in. Each one of us has a slightly different version of these files (ex: configuration files pointing to our individual development database or slightly modified app.config). Therefore, these files are permanently present in the pending changes view.
Is it possible to hide these pending changes so we never check them in by mistake?
Here How can I always block checkin of a specific file in TFS are some options named. To not see your changes, you should follow the workspace approach.