I am wanting to use VisualStudio.com to link work-items and user stories to source control check-ins for a current project of mine that is hosted on Codeplex.
The project is an open source project and has been hosted on Codeplex for several years. Now that I am doing a re-write, I am wanting to use an Agile process, creating user stories and building it in sprints, while I develop the app. The issue is that Codeplex's hosted TFS does not support this, while Visual Studio online does.
Visual Studio online is geared more towards closed-source projects with team members. It's offered for free, so I'm a bit bummed that they didn't open it up to support Open Source projects. Is there a way for me to have Visual Studio online host my source, and when I am ready to distribute a build, merge my branch in to Codeplex? I assume something along these lines is possible as the Prism team seems to do this with their releases. Since I don't have control over either TFS though, I'm not sure if external parties can do this or not.
If you use git on both projects (you can ask the Codeplex team to convert your project for you) then you can simply set up your git repo with two remotes.
Do you work locally and push to the main VSO git repo whenever you wish. When you've made enough changes that you want to push to Codeplex, just do a separate push to that remote and it'll be good to go.
If you're using TFVC on both then you're out of luck, unless you want to mess with the TFS Integration Platform (which I wouldn't recommend)
Related
I work from a small IT department and I'm pushing to move from our current TFS implementation to Visual Studio Online. My boss who gets the final say is hesitant because "What if Microsoft decides to stop offering the service, without notice, or their servers fail how will we get our code". While I find such a scenario unlikely and the scenario of our TFS server crashing and burning with no backups/bad backups much more likely. I still need to address his concern.
Does anyone know of a way to "backup" a remote TFS implementation? So far the only thing I've come up with is doing a nightly pull of Visual Studio Online and submitting it to a local repo, feels hacky, feels wrong.
Take a look over at the discussion on this StackOverflow question: Is There A Way To Backup Visual Studio Team Services Projects?
Here is Richard's answer:
There's no out of the box backup ability.
Now, if you are only referring to source control, and not work items,
pull requests, builds, test plans or anything else that the service
offers, then I'd suggest you migrate your code over to git.
With git every developer will have a complete copy of the source
repository, including all history and commit comments. From there,
it's a simple task to push the git repository to a different git
hoster (such as bitbucket or github) and make them your new centrally
hosted git repository.
On a historical note, Visual Studio Online at one point offered a data
export for a period of time. You might want to add a vote or three to
this related UserVoice idea to help raise the importance of the
feature with Microsoft.
Side comment: The business risks in using Visual Studio Online will
come from either Microsoft shutting down the Visual Studio Online
service or that the underlying Azure infrastructure has such a
catastrophic failure that your Visual Studio Online account is
unrecoverable. Both of those are extremely low risk, and very likely
lower than the risks you'd have running TFS on-premises, in your own
data centre, unless of course, your infrastructure and staff are
better than Microsoft's :-)
I agree with Richard. Visual Studio Online is not going anywhere :) You can also use tools like OpsHub, TaskTop, and Kovair to setup a two-way synchronization or use the TFS Integration Platform to do the same thing if you really wanted an option. If you are using Git repositories, you can clone the repository into other locations to maintain multiple copies. All of those options take effort.
I posted the same answer to this stackoverflow question.
We developed our own VSO backup tool. We scheduled it as a scheduled task and it runs once a night. It then
just clones all our repositories to disk.
Taken from this blog:
We use the VSO Rest API to query our VSO account and get all the data
we need. Since in VSO you can only have one Team Project Collection,
we retrieve all the team projects of the default collection. Each of
these team projects can have multiple repositories that need to be
backed up. A folder is created for each team project and saved to a
location on disk that can be configured in the app.config. When the
team project folder is created, the task loops over each repository in
the team project and creates folders for each repository.
You can also fork it on GitHub here
I'm trying to get my head around how to best organize my companies code set in visual studio 2013 TFS-git. We have multiple database projects and multiple web application projects. I like the idea of being able to develop a web app and the db at the same time in a particular solution but its not a one to one scenario. Multiple web apps talk to the same databases.
I know you can break things up into solutions and projects but not seeing too much out there in best practices in this area.
Any guidance? Thanks for your help.
I think this will help you what you are trying to do
Git init VS full Git support into all their ALM products. Here they have published for Visual Studio that adds Git source control integration. Git Extension includes add-ins for Older Visual Studio versions and Windows Explorer integration. It's regularly updated. And alternatively you can look for Git Source Control Provider
And you may also a read about TFS-GIT here
I have a project hosted on Sourceforge.net using Mercurial.
Are there any free continuous integration services that can interface with open source projects and start a build every time there is a push to upstream?
I have had a great experience with travic-ci.org (github) and drone.io (bitbucket) but now need something similar that integrates with sourceforge.
As a workaround I have set up a proxy-project bitbucket->drone.io that pulls the repository from sourceforge and builds it... but that is not really what I had in mind.
(I do not actually own the hosted project, so switching to github/bitbucket is not an option right now.)
That might be possible since March 11th, 2015.
See "How to use webhooks for Git, Mercurial, and SVN repositories": SourceForge has introduced webhooks!
It comes with webhook-management API.
I have a team of 3 developers and I want that we should be able to work on the project from our own homes, at any time (or at the same time) and make changes to the project. Till now, we have to mail each other all the updates versions to keep in sync. We are developing the project in Visual Studio 2010 currently and use SQL Express 2008. I searched internet and got some idea about Team Foundation Server but it requires Windows Server. I don't want to get into this mess and I have a Win7 Pc. Please suggest me some easy solutions.
There are any number of low-cost (often free to open source projects) hosted source control providers out there.
Personally I use Subversion along with the AnkhSVN plugin for Visual Studio.
Mercurial and Git are also quite popular and supported within Visual Studio via plugins.
Any of those options can be setup in a few minutes (if you use a hosted solution) and will all work for a small team.
Version Control is what your looking for,and your right there are some complicated solutions out there. TortoiseSVN isn't too complicated but works well.
We are planning to use Team Foundation Server, but we need to decide whether to use the Visual Studio Team Foundation Server source control plugin or the VisualSVN source control plugin inside Visual Studio.
If you plan to use TFS, go for the TFS Source Control, feature-wise it's as good as SVN if not better (history is managed the same way, branches too, perfs are better).
But where you get benefits in the TFS Source Control compared with SVN is in the integration with Work Item and the rest of TFS.
When you work on a given Task Work Item you can associate your check-ins (then changeset) with the Task, and it's very powerful because you'll have a more project based view than code view.
The Source Control of TFS is the lowest layer of the ALM Solution, you can avoid using it, but you'll lose a lot of things (integration with Work Item, Continuous Integration, Reports, etc.)
If you are planning to use Team Foundation Server, then use visual studio team foundation server source control plugin.