I noticed that for VS Projects controlled with TFVC, debug folders are ignored naturally without having to create a .tfignore file to exclude them. However, I have a legacy project that seems not to follow this behavior and I am unable to fix it because I don't know who's responsible for that behavior in the first place.
Can you explain why debug folders are ignored naturally without having to use a .tfignore?
There are already pre-defined list what files will be excluded by TFS if there is no custom .tfignore specified/present on the system.
You could refer to the "LocalItemExclusions.config" file under the path "C:\Users\youraccount\AppData\Local\Microsoft\Team Foundation\x.0\Configuration\VersionControl" folder and open".
(There may several folders named like 1.0, 2.0, 3.0, you need to make sure open the folder that match your TFS version.)
You could see that these folder and files types are ignored by default and they are defined in that file.
<Exclusion>bin</Exclusion>
<Exclusion>obj</Exclusion>
<Exclusion>*.exe</Exclusion>
If those files still could not be excluded by default in the legacy project on TFS, as a workaround, you could manually add a .tfignore file in that specific project.
SOLVED The problem turned out to be that - for any reason - the one who added the project to TFS the first time, added the debug and release folders with it - either deliberately or his VS was miss configured - and hence, the VS will keep track of those files even if ignored by default (natural behavior).
In order to solve it, I had to delete those folders form the TFS itself and then get the latest version to get the local copies deleted as well ... later after building the project and having those folders created again, VS will not recognize them as new files/folders because they are ignored by default as mentioned.
I'm working on a project where I'm writing a library. I have a file, lets call it... tester.cs which I use for testing the library. Now, I'm only supposed to check in the library but i accidentally also checked in tester.cs. Is there any way I can delete it from the remote server without deleting it locally? and also ultimately removing it from source control? Thank you in advance.
If you want to delete files on the TFS server and leave them locally. There's the obvious brute-force solution of copying the files to a temporary location, fixing source control, then adding them back in to your project.
And also here is a similar question for your reference: How to delete a file from TFS repository without deleting local file
It depends really on what you mean by 'delete'. TFVC has the concept of delete which flags a file as deleted in the Project Collection database (and removes it from your workspace etc.). And you have the concept op 'destroy' which means the file will be removed from the Project Collection databases, and action that is unrecoverable except by restoring a backup of TFS. But this will leave your local file in place and erase all traces of the file in source control.
However, if you added it to your project in VS (.proj file) then there will be a reference to the file in there as well for compilation etc. This will cause issues when other users perform a Get-Latest of your solution.
Also if you are using a local workspace you can use .tfignore files to prevent such files from being added into the local workspace in the first place. See this page, near the bottom there is some information about the .tfignore file and how they work.
I think it's as simple as making a local copy of a file, deleting it in TFS and moving the local copy back to the original location. Visual Studio does not allow you to do that in a C# project or Source Control Explorer.
If I add a new file to a project under TFS source control, it will check out the project file and the corresponding .vspscc file for that project file.
The project file itself changes (to include the new file), but the .vspscc file doesn't change at all. Why bother checking it out? Is there a way to disable it from being checked out and if there is, should I?
It gets checked out because under certain conditions it will be modified..and thus they checked it out as a matter of default. I wouldn't worry about it..it's not hurting anything, and if you disable it, it might bite you badly in the future in a bizarre way.
According to this post of Ben Ryan:
Team Foundation uses these to store lists of files that have been excluded from source control. We leveraged some of the existing SCC integration layer in Visual Studio to integrate Team Foundation, and these files were one of the carryovers. I'll have to check into what the logic was in breaking out these SCC settings into separate files as opposed to putting them in the solution and project files' SCC sections.
This file is a holdover from past VSS/TFS implementations, like Paulo Santos posted.
On the solution level, I have found no functional use for these files. In 10 years of using TFS, I have never seen that file altered. You can delete these .VSSCC files, as I commonly do for my closed source solutions.
But if you delete the solution-level .vsscc file, you will get a non-destructive error message on the first time open of the solution file...only after a new branch is created. All subsequent solution opening will not show the error message again.
My TFS setup standards have the solution file alone in the root folder, all projects are under sub-folders. Since those .vsscc files double the number of files in my root, I always delete them.
On a project level, I leave those files, as my team never opens project files directly, only solution .SLN files.
For my team, I prefer programmer ease of opening solutions over that one-time error message.
Visual Studio solutions contain two types of hidden user files. One is the solution .suo file which is a binary file. The other is the project .user file which is a text file. Exactly what data do these files contain?
I've also been wondering whether I should add these files to source control (Subversion in my case). If I don't add these files and another developer checks out the solution, will Visual Studio automatically create new user files?
These files contain user preference configurations that are in general specific to your machine, so it's better not to put it in SCM. Also, VS will change it almost every time you execute it, so it will always be marked by the SCM as 'changed'.
I don't include either, I'm in a project using VS for 2 years and had no problems doing that. The only minor annoyance is that the debug parameters (execution path, deployment target, etc.) are stored in one of those files (don't know which), so if you have a standard for them you won't be able to 'publish' it via SCM for other developers to have the entire development environment 'ready to use'.
You don't need to add these -- they contain per-user settings, and other developers won't want your copy.
Others have explained why having the *.suo and *.user files under source control is not a good idea.
I'd like to suggest that you add these patterns to the svn:ignore property for 2 reasons:
So other developers won't wind up
with one developer's settings.
So when you view status, or commit
files, those files won't clutter the code base and obscure new files you need to add.
We don't commit the binary file (*.suo), but we commit the .user file. The .user file contains for example the start options for debugging the project. You can find the start options in the properties of the project in the tab "Debug". We used NUnit in some projects and configured the nunit-gui.exe as the start option for the project. Without the .user file, each team member would have to configure it separately.
Hope this helps.
Since I found this question/answer through Google in 2011, I thought I'd take a second and add the link for the *.SDF files created by Visual Studio 2010 to the list of files that probably should not be added to version control (the IDE will re-create them). Since I wasn't sure that a *.sdf file may have a legitimate use elsewhere, I only ignored the specific [projectname].sdf file from SVN.
Why does the Visual Studio conversion wizard 2010 create a massive SDF database file?
No, you should not add them to source control since - as you said - they're user specific.
SUO (Solution User Options): Records
all of the options that you might
associate with your solution so that
each time you open it, it includes
customizations that you
have made.
The .user file contains the user options for the project (while SUO is for the solution) and extends the project file name (e.g. anything.csproj.user contains user settings for the anything.csproj project).
This appears to be Microsoft's opinion on the matter:
Adding (and editing) .suo files to source control
I don't know why your project stores the DebuggingWorkingDirectory in
the suo file. If that is a user specific setting you should consider
storing that in the *.proj.user filename. If that setting is shareable
between all users working on the project you should consider storing
it in the project file itself.
Don't even think of adding the suo file to source control! The SUO
(soluton user options) file is meant to contain user-specific
settings, and should not be shared amongst users working on the same
solution. If you'd be adding the suo file in the scc database I don't
know what other things in the IDE you'd break, but from source control
point of view you will break web projects scc integration, the Lan vs
Internet plugin used by different users for VSS access, and you could
even cause the scc to break completely (VSS database path stored in
suo file that may be valid for you may not be valid for another user).
Alin Constantin (MSFT)
By default Microsoft's Visual SourceSafe does not include these files in the source control because they are user-specific settings files. I would follow that model if you're using SVN as source control.
Visual Studio will automatically create them. I don't recommend putting them in source control. There have been numerous times where a local developer's SOU file was causing VS to behave erratically on that developers box. Deleting the file and then letting VS recreate it always fixed the issues.
No.
I just wanted a real short answer, and there wasn't any.
On the MSDN website, it clearly states that
The solution user options (.suo) file contains per-user solution
options. This file should not be checked in to source code control.
So I'd say it is pretty safe to ignore these files while checking in stuff to your source control.
I wouldn't. Anything that could change per "user" is usually not good in source control. .suo, .user, obj/bin directories
These files are user-specific options, which should be independent of the solution itself. Visual Studio will create new ones as necessary, so they do not need to be checked in to source control. Indeed, it would probably be better not to as this allows individual developers to customize their environment as they see fit.
You cannot source-control the .user files, because that's user specific. It contains the name of remote machine and other user-dependent things. It's a vcproj related file.
The .suo file is a sln related file and it contains the "solution user options" (startup project(s), windows position (what's docked and where, what's floating), etc.)
It's a binary file, and I don't know if it contains something "user related".
In our company we do not take those files under source control.
They contain the specific settings about the project that are typically assigned to a single developer (like, for example, the starting project and starting page to start when you debug your application).
So it's better not adding them to version control, leaving VS recreate them so that each developer can have the specific settings they want.
.user is the user settings, and I think .suo is the solution user options. You don't want these files under source control; they will be re-created for each user.
Others have explained that no, you don't want this in version control. You should configure your version control system to ignore the file (e.g. via a .gitignore file).
To really understand why, it helps to see what's actually in this file. I wrote a command line tool that lets you see the .suo file's contents.
Install it on your machine via:
dotnet tool install -g suo
It has two sub-commands, keys and view.
suo keys <path-to-suo-file>
This will dump out the key for each value in the file. For example (abridged):
nuget
ProjInfoEx
BookmarkState
DebuggerWatches
HiddenSlnFolders
ObjMgrContentsV8
UnloadedProjects
ClassViewContents
OutliningStateDir
ProjExplorerState
TaskListShortcuts
XmlPackageOptions
BackgroundLoadData
DebuggerExceptions
DebuggerFindSource
DebuggerFindSymbol
ILSpy-234190A6EE66
MRU Solution Files
UnloadedProjectsEx
ApplicationInsights
DebuggerBreakpoints
OutliningStateV1674
...
As you can see, lots of IDE features use this file to store their state.
Use the view command to see a given key's value. For example:
$ suo view nuget --format=utf8 .suo
nuget
?{"WindowSettings":{"project:MyProject":{"SourceRepository":"nuget.org","ShowPreviewWindow":false,"ShowDeprecatedFrameworkWindow":true,"RemoveDependencies":false,"ForceRemove":false,"IncludePrerelease":false,"SelectedFilter":"UpdatesAvailable","DependencyBehavior":"Lowest","FileConflictAction":"PromptUser","OptionsExpanded":false,"SortPropertyName":"ProjectName","SortDirection":"Ascending"}}}
More information on the tool here: https://github.com/drewnoakes/suo
Using Rational ClearCase the answer is no. Only the .sln & .*proj should be registered in source code control.
I can't answer for other vendors. If I recall correctly, these files are "user" specific options, your environment.
Don't add any of those files into version control. These files are auto generated with work station specific information, if checked-in to version control that will cause trouble in other work stations.
No, they shouldn't be committed to source control as they are developer/machine-specific local settings.
GitHub maintain a list of suggested file types for Visual Studio users to ignore at https://github.com/github/gitignore/blob/master/VisualStudio.gitignore
For svn, I have the following global-ignore property set:
*.DotSettings.User
*.onetoc2
*.suo .vs PrecompiledWeb thumbs.db obj bin debug
*.user *.vshost.*
*.tss
*.dbml.layout
As explained in other answers, both .suo and .user shouldn't be added to source control, since they are user/machine-specific (BTW .suo for newest versions of VS was moved into dedicated temporary directory .vs, which should be kept out of source control completely).
However if your application requires some setup of environment for debugging in VS (such settings are usually kept in .user file), it may be handy to prepare a sample file (naming it like .user.SAMPLE) and add it to source control for references.
Instead of hard-coded absolute path in such file, it makes sense to use relative ones or rely on environment variables, so the sample may be generic enough to be easily re-usable by others.
If you set your executable dir dependencies in ProjectProperties>Debugging>Environment, the paths are stored in '.user' files.
Suppose I set this string in above-mentioned field: "PATH=C:\xyz\bin"
This is how it will get stored in '.user' file:
<LocalDebuggerEnvironment>PATH=C:\xyz\bin$(LocalDebuggerEnvironment)</LocalDebuggerEnvironment>
This helped us a lot while working in OpenCV. We could use different versions of OpenCV for different projects. Another advantage is, it was very easy to set up our projects on a new machine. We just had to copy corresponding dependency dirs. So for some projects, I prefer to add the '.user' to source control.
Even though, it is entirely dependent on projects. You can take a call based on your needs.