Does anyone know, if there is a possibility, to show the date of the check-out in the check-in dialog?
This would have the advantage for me, if i want to check-in all files with a known date of the checkout, e.g. all files i checked out today, than i could just sort them instead of search them and compare every single file.
It is not unusual that my list of checked out files becomes a bit longer until i am able to check them in again.
Thanks in advance for any suggestions.
I don't believe this is possible within VS. However, if you install TFS Power Tools, you should be able to perform a check-in from Windows Explorer; then (and this is by no means an exact science) you could sort by Date Created. I believe this should give you what you want.
A possibly better way to do this would be to make use of multiple workspaces. If you're working on things that can be independently checked in, then separating them using workspaces seems to make more sense; this also prevents the possibility of you booking in some changes that rely on other changes that you may have done on a different day.
I know you are on TFS2010 and possibly VS2010 but in VS 2012/Team Explorer Everywhere you have the option of excluding and Including files during check-in. YOu should probably check it out.
Check this link below:
http://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/library/jj155786.aspx
Related
We are using Visual Studio 2013 with Team Foundation Server 2012. We are using local workspaces. We are just moving from another source control program (StarTeam) to TFS.
One of the big things we are missing from StarTeam is the ability to customize our view, and specifically a view of all the local non-current files. Our projects are enormous with multiple directories and sub-directories. If one or more files within a directory is out of date the primary folder in TFS still shows Yes under Latest. This makes some of our users think they are up-to-date when they are not. In StarTeam we could show all descendants and filter to our hearts' content - based on status, size, location, locked or not, who last changed it, who created it, the check-in comments, dates, times, etc., etc.
The closest thing we've found in TFS is to right-click on the main branch and select Compare. This almost does what we want, but it has very limited ability to filter and it takes forever.
I tried the Diff All Files extension but that brings up a separate compare window for each different file with the actual differences highlighted.
I have Beyond Compare set up as the compare/merge tool in Visual Studio but that works only for files, not folders/branches.
Is there any native functionality that can do this? Or an extension? Or a way to set the external compare tool to compare folders as well as files? Or a way to get the primary folder to show No under Latest if any files in that folder have changed? We have a lot of frustrated users and for some reason they're all coming to me.
Thanks in advance.
I can suggest you an external tool:
Diff All Files for VS2013
"Quickly compare changes to all files in a TFS shelveset, changeset, or with pending changes."
Seems what you need.
I hope this qualifies as programming related since it involves how to structure a project.
Because I've always used the web site model with VS.net I never had solution and project files and putting everything into source control worked great. I knew that everything I had in my web site directory was all I needed for the web site.
Now I'm using asp.net MVC and it only has a project model so now I have these solution and project files. If I work on it alone it's fine but once other people start to add/delete files from the project our solution file gets messed up and people end up having to grab the latest solution file, see what got changed and then add back/remove their files and check in the solution file again. It's become sort of a problem because sometimes people don't realize the solution file was changed, they make other changes and then when they check in everything other people do an update on their files they find that their files are gone from the project (although still physically on disk).
Is this normal? Is there a way to structure a project so that we don't need to check in solution and project files?
Your developers are not using TFS correctly. You should have multiple check-outs turned on, and everyone needs to be careful to merge their changes correctly when checking in. TFS will prompt you to do this, and accepting the defaults is nearly always the right thing to do.
It's not uncommon to have one or two developers who never get it, and you might have to help them now and then. But every programmer who works on a team needs to learn how to use source control tools correctly. If they can't manage that, they shouldn't be writing software.
[edit] It occurs to me that you might run into these problems if you check in the *.sln file directly, rather than choosing to "Add Solution to Source Control".
I don't think it's normal - what are you using for source control? It sounds like developers aren't respecting changes that others a making - checking in without merging first.
I know that early on in a project, when lots of files are being added & deleted, it can be a problem to keep up - you need to check out the project file, add your files, then check in the new file & project so other developers can also update it. You'll probably have multiple project files in a solution - perhaps one interim solution would be to have one "holding" project for each developer, then clean them up periodically - though these types of temporary fixes do have a tendency to become permanent.
I don't know of a way to set up a project file that's not in source control, though I suppose you could create a script that would generate them.
Having been through this, the key is respect & good communication between the developers.
This tends to happen with TFS multiple check outs. It can be hard to grasp coming from VSS to TFS as VSS allowed one person to check a file out at one time. Auto-merge should work most of the time for you but a couple of rules should ease the pain:
Check in early and often (if you add remove or rename a file check it in straight away even if it is a blank holder)
Before you check in do a get latest, this will ask you to resolve conflicts locally
Try to get continuous integration set up so that developers always know the state of the buidl and whether it is OK to check in\out.
We had a bit fo pain at the start of our current project but it soon settled down when we followed the rules above.
Personally, I think making changes to project and solution files requires discipline and clear (well understood) rules throughout your development team. These files (.sln, .*proj) are the bottlenecks of your project, and any errors or inconsistencies can cost you in team downtime. Changes need to be well thought out, planned and then executed.
They must be secured by source control (which you're already using, excellent) and your team members should work on the basis of only making the changes they need, and not leaving project or solution files checked out for an extended period.
If you are allowing multiple (shared) checkouts, this could become problematic in terms of overwriting another user's changes. Depending on your source control mechanism, people may be required to manually merge changes. Personally, I'd ask people to negotiate their project/solution changes with each other over merging (this can't always be achieved).
A third option if you are using TFS is the shelve feature. If someone needs to make changes locally, they can shelve the changes and merge later.
Lastly, another strategy is to try to architect your solution to be as modularized as possible - so people are distributed, working on separate projects and do not (ideally) have to overlap on too many common areas.
I'm not sure if you are using TFS, as people have mentioned, but if you are (or if you are using source control with similar capabilities) you can set it such that sln and csproj files are exclusive lockouts and are not able to be merged.
We have done this with quite large teams and while it causes some initial issues as people get used to it in the long run it has resolved many issues that were previously causing problems. Essentially you trade longer term merge issues/complexity for short term compile/checkin issues which we have found to be a good trade off.
Once you have set it to forced exclusive checkout and no merge you then get your dev teams used to the fact they should keep locks on the sln and proj files for as shorter time as possible.
Always check them in.
Always check out latest (merge if possible), make sure your change is there, before checking in a new version.
If your source control doesn't require a special action to check in from an old version, GET A DIFFERENT SOURCE CONTROL.
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.
I'm using Visual Studio 6.0 and Visual Basic 6.0.
I have them integrated but when I check out a Project and then try to edit a module in that project it's locked and I have to manually right-click on it and do a Check Out to unlock it.
I thought there was a way to have VSS automatically check out the file for editing.
Any suggestions?
I agree with kris here. Now I know that a bunch of folks saying your "software stinks" doesn't really answer your question. But there is a world of difference between a check out style source control and a file locking system like Source safe. The general consensus is that Check out systems are far superior.
With check out, what you do is you check out the project from your repository. All the files are editable. You work on your project as normally. Then before you checkin you do another update. If anybody else in your team did a update the software will automatically merge in the changes into your code. You will have a chance to review the merges and resolve any conflicts. After the update you can then check in your changes which everyone else can retrieve.
The big scary part is the merging part. Back when CVS and subversion where just command line tools it was a little scary as it was a pain to retrieve what happened with the merging. But with today's tools like Tortoise is all visual. In the last couple of years I can't think of any instance where a automatic merge failed. Any conflicts (basically two people edit the same line of code) are display right here for you to resolve.
Subversion
Tortoise SVN
There is an option in SourceSafe under the "Local Files" tab labeled "Use read-only flag for files that are not checked out". By default this option is selected, but if you unselect it, you will be able to edit any file in the project without checking it out.
Once you uncheck the option, you can get the latest version of a project to remove the read-only flag from all the files.
When you check out a file, you will be warned that there is a writable copy of the file in your working folder, at which time you can replace it with the version in the SourceSafe database.
I never figured out a way to do this. It was always a huge pain. Sorry for posting a negative answer, but I figured that you might want to know that you aren't alone in hating this, but that there wasn't an immediate and obvious answer. I'll be following this question along with you in case someone out there does know of a solution...
I don't think it is possible to do this (at least it wasn't when we used VSS eight years ago), but while you are experiencing the pain of a check out styled source control, run - don't walk, to some real, non-locking style source control solution. SVN, CVS, Git, Mecruial, anything that doesn't lock files, and doesn't leave your source in a proprietary file sytem. We switched to CVS eight years ago because we lost all of our source history (the code was checkout out so it was retrievable), due to a VSS glitch. Best thing we ever did, made collaboration ten times easier. Now CVS isn't the best solution (it was the most reasonable solution for windows back then), but anything is better than VSS.
Best solution I found was to check out all the files. Took a bit of poking around to figure out how to do that. Here's how:
How to check out all VB6 Project files from VSS?
when I check out a Project and then
try to edit a module in that project
it's locked and I have to manually
right-click on it and do a Check Out
to unlock it
Like it or not, it works that way by design i.e. you can check out all the files but you have to explicitly choose to do so, rather than being the default option. I guess that's because checking out all modules (class modules, forms, usercontrols, etc) locks out all other users from the entire project, which is normally undesirable in a team collaboration environment.
I just wonder what the best approach is to have multiple users work on a Project in Visual Studio 2005 Professional.
We got a Solution with multiple Class Libraries, but when everyone opens the solution, we keep getting the "X was modified, Reload/Discard?" prompt all the time. Just opening one project is an obvious alternative, but I find it harder to use as you can't just see some of the other classes in other projects that way.
Are there any Guidelines for Team Development with VS2005 Pro?
Edit: Thanks. The current environment is a bit limited in the sense there is only 1 PC with RDP Connection, but that will change in the future. Marking the first answer as Accepted, but they are all good :)
What you need is source control.
You should definitely not open the same files over the network on multiple machines. For one thing, Visual Studio has safeguards in place to prevent you from modifying certain files during a build, but it has none of that that will prevent others from modifying the same files over the network.
By setting up source control, each developer will have a separate copy of the files locally on his or her developer machine, and periodically communicate with the source control system to check in/commit changes. After that, other developers can ask for the latest updates when they're ready to retrieve them.
Use source control to keep a central repository of all your code. Then each user checks out their own copy of the source code and works locally. Then submits only the code that changed.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Version_control
A number of people have recommended using source control and I totally agree. However you also need do the following.
Exclude your personal options files from the repository (eg your .suo files)
Exclude your App.config files from the repository. - Not entirely but you need to have a Template.App.config. You commit that instead, and only copy your App.config into the Template.App.config when you make structural changes. That was each user has their own individual config for testing.
There are probably some other files worth excluding (obj directories and so forth) but thats all I can think of right now.
Peter
This might sound snide, but if you're opening up the solution from a shared location then you're doing something wrong. If that's the case then you should start using source control (something like Subversion) and have everyone check out a copy of the project to work on.
However if you're already using source control, then it might be a symptom of having the wrong things checked in. I find that you only need the sln, and the vcproj under source control.
Otherwise I don't know...
You should definitely, definitely be working with source control!
This will help stop the collisions that are occurring. Also, if you are making changes to the shared projects this often that it is a problem, then also ensure that all code is tested before getting checked in (otherwise they may bust someone else's build), but make sure they check in often (or time gained from not dealing with prompts will be lost in merging conflicts) :)