Following on from my previous question ( Watin does not work on my TFS build machine ), I have made my TFS build an interactive process.
I do however, get the following error when I run the build:
The working folder d:\Build\Sources is already in use by the workspace 8_1_appsdev_build;myUserAccount$ on computer myComputerName.
After some research, it seems that I need to delete my workspaces. If tried to list my workspaces with the following command, but the results indicate that I do not have any workspaces. Not sure what I am missing. Any ideas?
View workspaces command:
tf workspaces /computer: myComputerName /owner:*
No workspace matching *;* on computer myComputerName found in Team
Foundation Server http://myComputerName:8080/tfs/production.
Thanks!
You can find and delete the workspace by opening Visual Studio on build servers with same account or by using workspace sidekicks from TFS Sidekicks tool.
You don't necessary have to delete the workspace, something apparently going wrong here.
The message is just telling you that you attempt to create a new workspace with a mapping that is already used by another workspace.
For instance:
WorkspaceA already exists, it has one mapping: $\ to c:\pipo
Any attempt to create a WorkspaceB with a mapping that use c:\pipo (or a subfolder) will failed.
Maybe you create a previous Build Definition that use the same local path as the one you're trying to run: this will fail the same way.
To sum up there's per default one Workspace per Build Definition with the ability to make it persistent or not (mainly for speed optimization during the get of files), make sure two build definition don't use the same path in local.
tf workspaces looks at the workspace cache file to provide output. If you're running tf as yourself, you will only see workspaces that you have connected to. Thus, you would not see the build user's workspaces (regardless of the /owner option, which simply acts as a filter.)
Either run tf workspaces as the build user, or use the /collection argument to force a query of the workspaces on the server, bypassing the cache.
Related
Im a trainie and learning C# at the moment and have basic knowledge about how TFS and workspaces work.
Im using VS2017 in a VM which has access to TFS.
Problem
when i go in to VS2017 Source code control i can see the shared user workspace name. And when i try to use dev cmd or normal command prompt and type the tf workspaces, it does not show any workspace available and gives me the error "There is no corresponding workspace found on this computer".
Is there anyway to see it in CMD?
Reason
the reason i need to test this function is that, We have a Deploy .bat/.cmd file which calls the TFS for new update, do a Realase version and then put it to a given fix directoy.
Im sorry if i cant provide more details about the problem. Company Policy.
I could try to answer any further questions.
Thanks for the replies.
Unless you provide a filter such as owner, computer or workspace name, Team Foundation only displays information about the workspaces that you have created.
Command to get workspaces on current VM:
tf workspaces /owner:* /computer:* /server:teamserver
Workspace Commands
Note: To use the workspace command you must have the Read permission set to Allow.
Word of caution: Pulling down a release version from a bat file is normally a bad approach and can cause problems. I would recommend taking the opposite approach. Instead of running a bat file to trigger a build/deploy
have TFS trigger the deployment and workspace update by some action or manual action in order for it to control your process. You can always use the bat file for deployment steps just have TFS setup and call it for you.
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 currently have a TFS 2010 Server running on SERVER-1. On my client (MY-CLIENT) I have VS2010 running and have a workspace associating SERVER-1 with \MY-CLIENT\Development. All is good.
I was playing around with setting up a different instance of TFS on SERVER-2. On my client, I deleted the original SERVER-1 workspace and created a new workspace associating SERVER-2 with \MY-CLIENT\Development. All is good.
Having finished my experiments with TFS on SERVER-2, I re-imaged the machine (deleting the TFS Server on SERVER-2).
I then went back to my client machine, reconnected to TFS on SERVER-1 and attempted to remap source control to my Development folder. However, am now receiving the error "The path \MY-CLIENT\Development is already mapped in workspace MY-CLIENT;SERVER-2\Steve." Now I have a problem.
So, I gather from this that I should have first deleted the SERVER-2 workspace BEFORE re-imaging the machine. Unfortunately, I did not do that.
Poking around in some forums, I realize that I can use a command line tool to perhaps delete it:
tf workspace /delete MY-CLIENT;SERVER-2\Steve
However, when I run this, I get a message indicating that "Team Foundation services are not available from server http://SERVER-2:8080/tfs/development."
So the question, then, is how do I force deletion of the SERVER-2 workspace on my client so that I can re-create my old SERVER-1 workspace?
The working folder mappings for all the local workspaces is stored in the version control cache file. This allows you to bootstrap TFS clients, allowing them to locate the server information for a given local folder. In addition, it will provide the information for this test you're seeing, that prevents a local folder from being mapped to two different servers.
In order to clean this up (without trying to connect to the server), you can use the tf workspaces command (note the pluralization - the workspaces command operates on the list of workspaces, the workspace command operates on a workspace and generally requires connectivity to the server that workspace is located on.
To delete all workspaces for your deleted project collection, you can do:
tf workspaces /remove:* /collection:http://server-2:8080/tfs/DefaultCollection
(Obviously replacing the project collection URI with the URI for your deleted server.)
I had exactly the same issue: After moving TFS server to another machine, I couldn't map to a local folder in VS2012 on the old machine because it was still associated with an old Workspace that TFS denied all existence of. After many hours (and days) searching Google and trying different things, none of which worked (including all the "tf" commands, deleting the local cache etc), this is how I eventually solved it:
Edit the actual TFS collection database on the TFS server using SQL Management Studio Express (e.g. "Tfs_DefaultCollection")
Look for the "dbo.tbl_Workspace" table and edit it
You should see your "ghost" workspace(s) in here
Delete the rows
All is right in the world
The workspaceowner parameter on the delete command is optional. Can you issue the delete without that parameter, or will that damage another MY-CLIENT workspace?
I got Team Explorer Everywhere so we can use TFS on the Mac Mini we got to test Iphone apps. Since we're using XCode for phonegap, we need to use the commandline program and it is giving me a lot of grief.
What I've done so far (Listing out for anyone who stumbles on this so they can use it):
-Downloaded the trial (free)
-Set the path using PATH=$PATH\:/FOLDERLOCATION
-Accepted EULA and got trial product key... for command line program (tf eula/tf productkey -trial)
-Set up workspace:
tf workspace -new WORKSPACENAME -server:http://SERVERNAME:PORT/FILEPATH -comment:"WORKSPACENAME" && prompted for username -> domain -> password
-Trying to setup the folder path (Fixed):
tf workfold -map SERVERFOLDERPATH LOCALFOLDERPATH -collection:http://SERVERNAME:PORT/FILEPATH -workspace:WORKSPACENAME && prompted for username -> domain -> password
-Make sure I can check out/check in (On hold):...
The error I'm getting right now is "An argument error occurred: First free argument must be a server path." This is what I've been following ever since I got the path set, but I think the versions are different because mine doesn't seem to be set up the same. Any help at all would be appreciated, and I'll keep up with the post as I figure parts out because there doesn't seem to be much online that I can find on TFS on macs.
Update: As normal, I'm an idiot. Have to put the options at the end of the command and have to have the serverfolder path as the first thing after -map. Now I just need to figure out how to use the damn thing. I'll post any other questions I have and try to get all the correct commands up for the selfish reason of having them somewhere in case I forget them later.
Update 2: The mapping hasn't worked out as well as I'd hoped, it seems a combination of my unfamiliarity with Unix/Mac file systems and some settings being missing is keeping me from using 'tf get' to load all of the test data I was trying to get. I'm planning on trying again after I get the location of where my boss wants the data saved and after I can look into something that would save the workspace so it won't say that it can't find the map path every time...
It looks like you're setting up your workspace and some working folder mappings just fine, after the edit. If you're having problems doing a tf get after this, then there are some common problems that might be occurring. TFS workspaces can be a little bit opaque and having a better understanding of them can sometimes help you understand where the problem is:
Team Foundation Server requires a workspace to be configured before you can get files out of source control, edit them or check them back in. A workspace basically simply contains working folder mappings that map your local path(s) to server path(s).
Workspaces are stored on the server and are uniquely identified by your computer's hostname, your username and the workspace's name. A cache of this information for the local host is saved on the client. This implies:
If you remove a workspace on the server, your workstation will be unable to connect.
If you remove the cache, your local computer will not be able to identify the workspace based on working folder mappings until the cache is rebuilt (which happens every time you connect to the server.)
If you change your username or local workstation's name, you cannot access those workspaces.
(Note that very early versions of the Teamprise command line client had certain issues on Mac OS that made identifying the local workstation name difficult. This is fixed, however, in Team Explorer Everywhere.)
Because you can have multiple workspaces for a single server on a single workstation, you can't always simply provide server paths to tf commands, since server paths are ambiguous. ($/ exists in every workspace, for example.) So the command line client resolves paths based on the current working directory and/or the arguments provided. Meaning that you can run tf get foo.txt if you're in a working folder, or you can run tf get /tmp/foo.txt if /tmp is mapped.
One more point - the configuration data for Team Explorer Everywhere is shared between the TFS plug-in for Eclipse and the command line client. So if you're more comfortable using a GUI to set up your workspace(s), you can do that and then use the CLC as you see fit. You don't need to be a Java programmer to use Eclipse - simply download Eclipse and install the TFS plug-in for Eclipse into it, and select Window > Open Perspective > Team Foundation Server Exploring. After that, you'll have the full GUI Team Explorer experience and this perspective will be restored when you open Eclipse, so you won't even need to worry about the Java IDE bits if you don't want to.
I got new working machine and because our TFS server is located very far from jobsites I want to avoid downloading all source codes again (several GBs) so want to move my old workspace to new one. I have copied all projects via LAN and Working folders list in Workspaces is empty in VS on new machine.
So how to move all items from old workspace to new one without adding them manually and downloading all the data again?
It's super easy to migrate your workspaces from an old machine, given your exact scenario. See this other thread on Stackoverflow:
Import Visual Studio TFS workspaces
Shelve everything in your workspace and unshelve it to the new computer. When you create the shelfset, make sure that "Preserve pending changes locally" is not checked.
This will, effectively move the workspace from one computer to another.
** Update based on question being updated **
I don't think there's an easy way for you to do what you are wanting to do within a workspace. Instead, you should be looking at the TFS Proxy. When you implement the proxy, it sits between your workstation and the TFS repository, and helps proxy gets, check-outs, and check-ins to help speed up your interaction with TFS.