I am a bit confused about the concept of workspace and working folders. I see in the Source Control Explorer I can setup multiple workspaces on my machine. My understanding of workspace is basically a folder that contains all of my projects (even unrelated ones). For example, C:\Projects
I currently have a single workspace that is called the name of my computer which points to a directory called C:\Projects that has several projects in it that are each their own project on visual studio online. For example: DESKTOP-43DDV90P has a working folder for each project inside of it.
WORKSPACE: DESKTOP-43DDV90P
Source Control Folder: $/Project1, Local Folder C:\Projects\Project1
Source Control Folder: $/Project2, Local Folder C:\Projects\Project2
I would like to know if this is a correct assumption OR if I should be creating a workspace per project like the following:
WORKSPACE: PROJECT1-WS
Source Control Folder: $/Project1, Local Folder C:\Projects\Project1
WORKSPACE: PROJECT2-WS
Source Control Folder: $/Project2, Local Folder C:\Projects\Project2
When I finish setting everything up with a new ASP.NET Core web application under source control my directory structure looks like the following:
C:\Projects\Project 1
this contains:
Project1 (folder vs creates for solution)
BuildProcessTemplates (folder from vs online)
C:\Projects\Project 1\Project1
this folder contains:
Project1 vs solution file
Project1 (folder that finally takes you to the project1 site files)
A TFS workspace is basically an account between your computer and the TFS server. It contains a set of ServerPath -> Local Path mappings, and some settings about how the workspace is maintained (e.g. permissions, file timestamp behavior, etc).
Often when working on a project you'll end up creating branches. This is when workspace mappings become relevant. If you don't have branches, then you'll usually just want to map the entire codebase - i.e. you want all of the sources. But when you do have branches, often you'll want only one branch at a time. For example, if I have this:
You can see how each branch contains the same set of files. If I'm developing something in the FeatureX branch, eventually I will merge it into the Master branch.
This is when your question becomes most relevant: do I have a workspace that contains both of these, or do I have separate workspaces for each branch? This is a matter of preference. I prefer to have separate workspaces, because it avoids the case where I've made changes in multiple branches and only want to check in changes to one of them. For example:
I might not notice in a larger project that I have modified files from two different branches. TFS does allow this, but usually when I'm working in one branch I don't want to affect another one. Another issue that can occur is that TFS sometimes has issues when merging changes if one of the included changesets spans multiple branches. For example, say I check in the pictured change; then I create a new branch (Feature2); then I merge the changeset into Feature2. What should happen? Does it take the copy that I checked into Master or into FeatureX? You can make this work, but the point is that you can also fall into some weird situations. With multiple workspaces, I would only ever see changes for the branch pertaining to that workspace:
That’s depending on your situation, company policy etc… It’s hard to manage if there are too many mapping in a workspace, if not, a workspace is ok.
Some articles about optimize that can help you:
Using multiple workspaces with Visual Studio
Optimize your workspace
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 had a solution containing the following projects:
Web App 01
Server Control Foo
Server Control Bar
Each project has its own directory in the root of the solution directory, directly mirroring the structure of the solution.
I branched the solution, then combined items 2 & 3 into a new project within that solution, then deleted projects 2 & 3. I committed the changeset. The resulting structure in VS2015 solution explorer was this:
Web App 01
Server Control Library
I then merged the branch, and committed this also. Over time, branching and merging has got slower and slower. On inspecting the file structure of my hard drive, and Visual Studio Online, I see this folder structure:
Web App 01
Server Control Foo
Server Control Bar
Server Control Library
Despite Solution Explorer not listing the deleted projects, the folders and files from all my deleted projects remain. Despite their status, they are also being branched every time. Is this the correct behaviour, and is it safe to delete them? If so, should I delete using VSO, Windows, or VS2015?
I assume you are using TFVC (changeset, branched the solution).
First, delete the projects from solution (right click the project in VS > Remove) just remove the relationship between projects and solution, the projects’ files and folder are still existing in the hard drive. So you need to delete these files and folders from hard drive (file system).
Secondly, these files are still existing in the source control too, because they aren’t marked as deleted if you just remove projects from solution, so check in changes just affect the solution file, it won’t delete files from source control. So you need to delete them from source control and it’s safe.
Steps to delete files:
Go to Source Control Explorer in VS
Right click Folder or file > Delete
Check in changes
BTW, the files still can be restored if you don’t permanently destroy them. (Destroy command), more information, you can refer to this article: Delete or restore files and folders in Team Foundation Version Control (TFVC)
I have Team project in TFS, and I map it to folder "Common projects" with many projects inside, by example
Common projects
prj1
prj2
..
prjn
TFS adds all of them and it slows my machine. I want to unmap most of them, but if I make "Remove mapping" for prj1, it also deletes its folder physically from my hard drive. Is there a way to map projects in mapped folder selectively, and leave other on harddrive? Or I need to create separate folder especially for synchronization with TFS..
upd.:
I update my post with answer as I understand from google that people searching the solution.
Step 1: File-> Source control-> Advanced-> Workspaces-> Remove, click "No" when popup dialog appears. But after this on next random "Get"(on other project in other folder) - files will be deleted from local, becouse TFS "remembers" associations even they are removed from Workspace. To prevent it - step 2:
p.s.: try it on Your own risk, make backups and tests.
You are looking for something called Cloaking. By using cloaking, you can map a root folder to a local workspace. As you've noticed, this implicitly downloads all the sub folders beneath the root folder.
When you now select a sub folder you don't want, you can select Cloak. This means that the sub folder (and anything beneath it) won't be downloaded to your pc.
The MSDN topic Optimize your workspace has the info you need. If you look at the example, you want to perform step 2 and 4.
My Visual Studio projects are located in C:\Users\MyName\ProjectName.
To make life easier (I thought), I created a file system link in the root called TFS.
(i.e. C:\TFS points to C:\Users\MyName\Projects)
I always open my projects from the link (i.e. C:\Tfs\ProjectName\ProjectName.sln) and my TFS local paths uses the link.
This work fine most of the time but someVisual Studio and TFS think files are in C:\Users\MyName...
i.e. If I look at the properties of projects in a solution, one can be in C:\Tfs and another in C:\Users. I have verified that there are no absolute paths in any solution or project files.
When this happen and I add a new file to a project TFS becomes a real mess. TFS thinks the new file is in C:\Users and is not versions controlled but at the same time there is a file with the same name in the C:\TFS folder so I need to resolve a conflict. I can resolve the conflict but TFS starts versioning the C:\Users file. i.e. the local folder for the project is C:\TFS... but according to TFS (and pending changes) the new files live in C:\Users.
I have not found a way to change the local name of file, only a folder.
Is there a way to resolve this or should I just get rid of the link?
(It works slightly better with a TFS local workspace but the problem is still there)
<tl;dr>
Symlinks are funny things and because TFVC stores binding information outside of the source control folder, it may get very confused when your repository is stored in or includes them.
Details
Opposed to Git, Mercurial and Subversion, TFVC doesn't just keep the binding of disk to repository in a subfolder of the repository (in case of a server workspace it doesn't keep this data on disk with the repository at all). It also stores it in a number of other places, namely the TFS server and your user profile.
When you look at a subversion or git repository you'll find the .svn or .git folders which contain the information of which folders on disk map to the repository.
With TFVC this information is not only stored on disk (in case of Local workspaces), but also on the server (machine name, server path, local path) and in your user profile (under AppData\Local\Microsoft\TeamFoundation\). These configurations store the full paths and these are used to see if a file is under version control or not. The reason why Local workspaces improve things, is because they add the tf$ folder with some of the binding information.
Since a workspace mapping can map a folder in your repository only to one folder on disk, the use of symlinks confuses the TFVC client. You might consider this a bug, since Microsoft should be able to resolve the link (depending on the link type), but Visual Studio assumes you are not using links. Other reasons why this (potentially) confuses Visual Studio is that file size and other attribute changes are not always signaled in case links are used (date changed and file size may not be notified until Visual Studio is told to refresh the solution). The Read-Only bit (which TFVC uses in case of server workspaces) also has special behavior in case links are used and may cause issues of undetected checkouts.
More on the strange edge cases caused by links, can be found here.
I'm not sure why you'd want to use a link in this case, the sources are already stored in TFS, so a backup of your profile doesn't add much and only makes you system slower in case you have a roaming profile. Plus, workspaces are machine bound and should never "move between machines" magically anyway.
You can submit a suggestion on the Visual Studio User Voice, or file a bug on Connect if you want to see this behavior changed, but to solve your problem, use normal folders and map your files to a unique location.
Just keep in mind, very few applications in Windows are built to handle Symlinks, and those that are may cause strange behaviors. Windows explorer (file open dialogs and drag&drop) may provide the original file location, instead of the link location for certain actions and changes to attributes in one location may not be visible in the linked location.
As you can see here, systems will be able to see the difference between symlinks and real directories, and thus may act on that knowledge:
To start with some background, I am a member of a small team developing an ASP.NET application. In addition to us, there are 2 other teams working on it, all from different countries. Source code is hosted on a shared SVN server but there is no central testing environment. Each developer runs the app on their own machine and data services are set up per team.
Unfortunately our SVN workflow has some gaps in it: annoyances arise when there is time for an SVN update.
It is mainly because each developer and team have slightly different environments in terms of disk directory structure and configuration (both IIS and app itself). Hence conflicts in configuration files and elsewhere that in essence are not conflicts at all - for runtime configuration (XML) and in *.suo.
How should we handle this if our objective is to keep checkout, app setup and update as painless as possible?
One option would obviously be master copies. Another one establishing uniformity in developer environments and keeping it. But what about a third alternative?
One thing to do is to not put the .suo files into SVN, there's no reason to do that.
For IIS configuration there should be no argument - uniform environment across the build team.
For app.config files and the like, I tend to keep them in a separate "cfg" directory in the root of the project and use pre-build events to copy in the relevant ones I need depending on the project and environment I'm working on.
You could have a separate build task to copy in user-specific config into your output directory. Add a new directory in your root project called "user.config or something, and leave it empty. Then configure your project build to check this for entries and copy them to the output directory. This is easy to do, and then each dev can have their own config without affecting the master copies. Just make sure you have an ignore pattern on that folder so you don't commit user-specific configuration. If you have svnadmin access to your source code repo, you could set a hook to prevent it from ever happening.
Also set ignore patterns on your root directory (recursively) for .suo, .user, _Resharper or any other extensions you think are pertinent. There are some So questions already on exactly this topic:
Best general SVN Ignore Pattern?
Ignore *.suo and *.user files in svn. It is easy. After that create two types of config files in subversion. Development and Server, if in use add Test also. See below example.
ConnectionStringDevelopment.config
ConnectionStringServer.config
AppSettingsDevelopment.config
AppSettingsServer.config
Server files would contain server information. Development files is not contained in svn and ignored there. Every new developer will start by copying server files and making changes according to his environment.
Look following example site
http://code.google.com/p/karkas/source/browse/trunk/Karkas.Ornek/WebSite/web.config
following lines are interest.
<appSettings configSource="appSettingsDevelopment.config"/>
<connectionStrings configSource="ConnectionStringsDevelopment.config" />
ConfigSource can be used almost everywhere in web.config therefore you will be able to change every config to every developer. Only make use of following naming convention. ignore *Development.config in subversion. This way no developer config will be added to subversion.
Its not a perfect solution (and should only be used if there are not many of those special files), but what I do is to add fake files for each case, and switch the real file locally to it.
In detail: I have a file foo that creates the problem. I also create foo_1 and foo_2 and then locally switch foo to foo_1 (I use tortoisesvn, so I cant really give you the command line to do that). Then I am working on foo on my machine, but actually commit to foo_1. Other parties could then switch to foo_2...
(I admit this is basically a variant of the master-file approach you suggested yourself; but if there are not many actual changes to those files this at least reduces the numer of conflicts you have to think about)