I've grown accustomed to reviewing file version history in TortoiseHg where I can right click on a file and show history. It gives me every change to that file across branches and repos in one linear history and gives me a summary comparison. Like this
I now need to use Visual Studio and TFS to review changesets and I don't find it as intuitive. This there a plugin or extension that allows me to view TFS changesets in a similar way to the Tortoise line of version control clients?
I've looked at TFS Power Tools, but that still just provides the default VS review options from Windows explorer.
The history feature in Team Explorer allows you to follow merges and it also provides the track changeset where you can see the origin of a specific change and trace it through multiple branches. However, I haven't seen any plugins that provide the visual representation you're looking for.
Related
How do I view and integrate with GitHub issues using Visual Studio 2022?
When connected to an Azure Repo, the VS Team Explorer window includes a "Work Items" view that shows open issues from Azure Boards. I can easily create a branch from one, link it automatically, and submit pull requests. The integration is great.
When I connect to a GitHub repository, that integration is lost. The Team Explorer window no longer contains a "Work Items" view. Since I can't view the issues, I can no longer automatically create branches that are linked to the issue. I have to now manually type in the issue number if I want to link a commit to the issue. And the "Create Pull Request" menu items simply launches the browser to the GitHub page; there's no integration there, either.
I have found a VS Code blog post that enables a lot of this functionality (and more) into VS Code, but I've yet to find anything for Visual Studio 2022. From that post, I am most interested in the "Working on issues" bit. As described above, this was functionality that worked with Azure Repos but is lost with GitHub integration. How might I regain that functionality with GitHub and Visual Studio 2022?
The "old" team explorer did a number of really nice things, but it was also very hard to integrate into for other tool vendors. With the new Git experience the Visual Studio team opted for a more agnostic approach.
The old Team Explorer was written in .NET 4 and was very much geared towards integrating with Azure DevOps. It stems from 2005 when Team Foundation Server first got released. Over time other vendors snuck their way into Team Explorer, but mostly through undocumented and unsupported ways. This has caused many interesting issues in the past. The concept of the Team Explorer window also wasn't ideal for hosting GitHub, Azure DevOps, BitBucket and every other tool-vendor that wanted to be listed and there was very little in the way of control for users to set the order of elements or hide certain tiles. As such it's a breeding ground for bugs and it needed to be ported to .NET Core and x64 and to support out-of-process extensibility to properly support Visual Studio 2022 anyway.
So Team Explorer and its old undocumented extensibility points were dropped and the new Git Window was born. This window is a pure git client and it's vendor agnostic. Vendors may add menu items to the top level menu, but they currently can't extend the new git window.
At the same time, Visual Studio 2022 dropped support for the built-in browser window, which was a memory hog, loads IE11 and also needed full retooling to support the x64 out-of-process loading that Visual Studio 2022 now demands.
All of this work now allows Visual Studio to use more memory, it's faster and by moving extensions out-of-process, it has greatly improved the performance and stability of the visual studio platform. Unfortunately this all happened at the expense of some features.
The new git experience is no longer constrained by the Team Explorer window, is a top-level citizen in Visual Studio and can finally use easier to remember keyboard shortcut keys. It's much faster too and the new architecture allowed the team to build interactive rebase, multi-repo support, submodule support and more. But their priorities have been in advanced git scenarios for a long while, not in building support for vendor specific issue integration. It looks like that may be changing though. Auto-completion of #... is now in Visual Studio 17.5 preview:
Some tool vendors may invest in native integration into Visual Studio in the future. Many old extensions are no longer available in VS2022 or the authors are still working on a new version that conforms to the new requirements.
On the other hand you have VS Code, which is used by GitHub itself internally, runs in a browser, powers github.dev and github codespaces and doesn't carry the legacy if Visual Studio 2022. It's not Microsoft, but GitHub who has extended vscode and they added the support for their platform through extensions and open source contribution to the editor directly. GitHub has a different stake in vscode, they have the engineering staff that knows how to extend atom-based applications (they basically built that technology) thus, their features have been added to vscode.
Is it fair? Do we want it in big VS as well? Sure, but unfortunately, that's currently not where the money is being spent.
There are a few ways to accomplish what you want. But none are exactly what you desire.
The web
The main way is to start working from the browser. On every issue there is a Development section from which you can create a branch or initiate a pull request from the associated branch:
You can then immediately check it out locally
Or navigate to the code panel for the branch and click the open in visual studio link. This will launch visual studio in the correct context using the repo you selected and will check out the branch locally for you to start working.
Any commits you make to this branch are automatically associated to the issue, so there's no need to pass in the #issuenumber every time.
The cli
An alternative to working from the browser is to use the CLI. If you have the GitHub CLI installed it will pick up the context of your repo from the list of remotes and you can perform quick commands straight from visual studio's built-in terminal.
gh pr create
to create a new PR.
gh issue list
to quickly list your open issues
gh issue develop #issuenumber
to create a branch on the remote, associate it to your issue and check out the branch locally.
It takes a bit of getting used to the commands, but if you like the CLI it's a quick way to work.
In Visual Studio
You can create pull requests from your current state, which will then bring you to the browser with most of the data pre-filled. Issue auto-completion also works in the browser from that point forward.
To get the other features you want, you must install extensions. Unfortunately, GitHub has stopped development on the old GitHub for Visual Studio extension since most of its features have now moved into visual studio. It's not easy to build and maintain an extension for multiple versions of Visual Studio, so I don't expect this will be brought back to life.
I rely on the Git Web links extension to quickly switch between web and visual studio from the context of my working files:
In the settings you can set the default behavior to not copy, but to open in browser.
Other functionality you're after is currently not available through a publicly listed extension. Most of there features have also been removed or deprecated for Azure DevOps itself, so I don't expect the Visual Studio team to be in a hurry to add first-class support for Issue tracking back in.
Unfortunately, the "Work Items" view and the related issue integration for GitHub Repos is not currently available in Visual Studio 2022 out of the box.
You might be able to find a Visual Studio extension that provides this functionality, but I'm not aware of any off the top of my head.
An alternative option would be to use the GitHub API to retrieve the issues, and create a custom extension to display the issues in Visual Studio 2022. However, this would require custom development work on your part.
It seems like the VS2022 will have this feature in future (it's in Preview now).
https://youtu.be/0NiHvdoMBO8?t=95 [VS2022 Preview Feature]
I understand that TFS Local Workspaces are designed to help users work more seamlessly when not connected to the TFS server; however, unlike when using Server Workspaces, I cannot see the status of a file from Visual Studio Source Control Explorer. Our team is connected to the TFS Server 90% of the time. It seems that Local Workspaces should be able to communicate file checked-out status back to the TFS Server when connected. As a team manager I would like to know what files team members currently have checked out in several scenarios, while still retaining the flexibility offered by Local Workspaces.
I want to know how often team members are checking in their code (or not).
I want to know if someone is already working on a file before checking it out as well.
I want to handle a lost/broken laptop scenario by knowing which files had un-checked-in changes.
Is there a way to do this with Visual Studio Source Control Explorer or another tool?
Generally the items checked out will display automatically when you navigate to the specific items in Source Control Explorer. Reference below screenshot.
I want to know how often team members are checking in their code (or
not).
You just need to check the changesets history.
I want to know if someone is already working on a file before checking it out as well.
Just navigate to the specific items in Source Control Explorer as I mentioned above, it will shown the status in Pending Change column.
I want to handle a lost/broken laptop scenario by knowing which files had un-checked-in changes.
Generally the files with status displayed under Pending Change column are the files which have un-checked-in changes.
However there is a tool called Team Foundation Sidekicks which is a suite of tools ( includes Code Review Sidekick, Shelveset Sidekick, Labels Sidekick, History Sidekick, Workspace Sidekick and Status) for TFS administrators and advanced users providing rich GUI for administrative and advanced version control tasks, you can use it to check and track the things you required. (Unfortunately it's no available for VS 2017, the latest version 6.0 only works for VS 2015)
I have a lot of branches and changesets that are moving around, and to track them, I have to manually click on each changeset, track, etc. and it's really time consuming.
I'm trying to figure out a way to call the visualization window with arguments and just get the produced output.
I'm using VSTS, but I'd imagine the same applies to TFS.
I've looked at VSTS CLI (https://learn.microsoft.com/en-us/cli/vsts/?view=vsts-cli-latest) and TFS PowerTools but so far nothing seems to work.
For TFVC repo hosted in VSTS, you can not tracking changeset by VSTS cli or TFVC commands.
For TFVC repo hosted in TFS, there has no way to tracking changeset by TFS power tool neither.
I'm was looking for the proper way to exclude folders/files from team foundation server (2012) using visual studio 2012. I found:
how-to-exclude-certain-folders-from-visual-studio-2012-detected-changes-list on stackoverflow. However the shown detect changes link is missing in my team explorer. There should be a detect changes link in the red circle as compared to the screenshot in the linked question
I could not comment on the original question to ask this, so I made a new one. Does anyone know where the detected changes link went. (and yes the project had pending changes when I tested)
That's not a verb ("detect changes"), it's a noun: "detected changes". Which are changes that were found on the filesystem by watching your activity, but will not be included in the checkin.
This occurs when you use a local workspace. You will not see it if you are using a server workspace, since you must pend changes manually.
If you have changes that were made on the filesystem that were not pended, and you would like to detect them, run tfpt online from the TFS Power Tools. Or convert to a local workspace, and find them in the detected changes tab.
I'm currently working on .Net projects that are using either Git or Mercurial (Hg) source controls. I use Visual Studio 2010 for all of these projects. As I often have to switch source control providers I was wondering if there's a quick way to do this, so I don't have to go Tools -> Options -> Source Control once an hour.
A much better solution would be if Visual Studio would recognize which source control provider it needs or maybe remember which provider was used for a certain project. Can that be done?
With a nudge in the right direction I managed to handle this problem even better then expected - no switching necessary.
For Mercurial solutions I use VisualHG and for Git I use Git Source Control Provider. I also installed HgSccPackage. Now I don't really know how or why this works, but I've got GitSCC selected as the Source Control Provider in the settings, but when I load a Mercurial project VisualHG takes over. All I have to do is set the SCC to VisualHG the first time I open the project, close the project, change back to GitSCC and when the project is reloaded VisualHG will be used for it.
Interestingly it does not work without HgSccPackage installed. If someone can explain this, please do.
Note that it does not seem to work the other way round.
I use Git in combination with VS 2010 by keeping a commandline screen open. I do my work in Visual Studio and when I'm ready to make a commit, I switch to the commandline screen.
If you do this, you can use Git and Mercurial side by side in combination with VS 2010.