I work in many ASP.NET projects at once in VS 2019; I use TFS (without git), with a local workspace. As a way to make sure I have a "shelveset as a backup" in case I could lose my local work (hd fault, robbery, sticky fingers, lazy mind...), I am thinking of following these steps:
At the end of the day, I create a shelveset named with my username, preserving local changes.
The next morning, I continue working ignoring my first shelveset; Again, at the end of the day, I create a SECOND shelveset with my username+"2". When I'm sure it has been created without errors, I proceed to delete the first shelveset.
And the next morning I do the same, and so on...
What do you think guys, is it a good approach to make sure I will not lose any local changes in case of disaster?
Shelving is a simple way of storing your changed files. Your process is a bit convoluted. I'd simply run:
tf vc shelve /replace "daily backup" /noprompt /recursive
The command happens transactionally, so when it succeeds is replaced the old shelveset. If it fails, your previous changes will remain in tact.
An even better approach would be to craft smaller changes and to check in more often. That way your changes aren't just store on the server, but also integrated with your peers.
Visual Studio also has a built-in UI to suspend your changes. Open the My Work pael in Team Explorer and hit the Suspend work option. It will create a shelveset in the background.
The next day, simply Resume work:
Related
Is there a way in TFS to edit files and then (maybe) merge them later without having to do a checkout? Basically edit then only touch source control when I decide to update to the server, not in advance.
Or has 5 years of Mercurial and Git just led to me getting confused about how TFS works and what I want is not possible and doesn't matter because "checkout" is not exclusive. (most likely option? :-) )
(I have been here but that does not solve my issue)
There are ways to cheat that, but there's no good reason to do so. When you check out code from TFS, you're getting a local copy to work with. When you check it back in, it creates a changeset, which is an atomic commit of your changes to the source code repository. If you don't want to check it in, and go off and do something else, you can create a shelveset, which can be named and unshelved whenever you're ready.
Similarly, if you use Gated check-ins, that process creates a shelveset automatically and sends that for a validation build. If it fails, you just make changes to your shelveset and try again. If it succeeds, it checks a changeset into the source repository. It helps prevent checking in breaking changes.
A while ago, I accidentally checked in some unfinished unittest files I had changed and added in solution A together with some files that contained an actual bugfix for project B.
For some unknown reason I never noticed the checkin was going to include files from another solution so the checkin was done, after which other team members added more checkins to both solutions.
My question now is two-fold;
How can I undo the part of the checkin that hit solution A without affecting B at all
Is there a way to prevent mistakes like this from ever being possible to happen within Visual Studio (Enterprise 2015), make it impossible to checkin files not part of the currently opened solution somehow?
I think the easiest solution would be to use the ROLLBACK command, if you have installed the TFS power tools (TFPT) you should be able to do it within visual studio.
In your current branch, get the latest version from server then view history and find your changeset. Then right click and select "Rollback entire change set".
This will rollback the changes in your local workspace and checkout the file. (If there are conflicting changes you will have to resolve conflicts.)
Now when you are ready to check-in, exclude/undo the files which you don't want to rollback.
Commit/checkin the files which you want to rollback.
I haven't seen a better way of doing this, and think that this is much better than individually rolling back each file in the change set.
Now to answer your second question: check this ANSWER which I wrote a while back. I am copying it here for convenience.
As far as I tested, this default setting is controlled by the following registry entry. If the value of this registry entry is set as 1, then it should change the default behavior to filter by "Solution Changes".
"HKCU\Software\Microsoft\VisualStudio\12.0\TeamFoundation\SourceControl"
Name: FilterPendingChanges
REG_DWORD
Value: 1 = Show Solution Changes
Value: 0 = Show All
I'm trying to write a very lightweight "build" script which will basically just get a few files from TF (based on a Changeset number). Then I'll run those files in SQLCMD.
I'm using this:
tf.exe get c:\tfs\ /version:c2681 /force /recursive
However, this appears to get EVERYTHING, not just the files in changeset #2681. I'd like to be able to point it to the root of my tfs workspace, give it a changeset number, and have it just update those few specific files. Also, it appears to be getting older versions (perhaps what was current when changeset #2681 was checked in)?
Is there a way to get just those specific files, WITHOUT needing to call them out specifically in the tf get itemspec?
EDIT: I actually had to add the /force option in order for it to do anything at all. Without force, it doesn't appear to even retrieve from the server a file I deleted locally, that's definitely in the changeset.
thanks,
Sylvia
Everything mentioned in Jason's and Richard's posts above is correct but I would like to add one thing that may help you. The TFS team ships a set of useful tools separate from VS known as the "Team Foundation Power Tools". One of the Power Tools is an additional command line utility known as tfpt.exe. tfpt.exe contains a "getcs" command which is equivalent to "get changeset" which seems to be exactly what you are looking for.
If you have VS 2010, then you can download the tools here. If you have an older version, a bing :) search should help you find the correct version of the tools. If you want to read more about the getcs command, check out Buck Hodges's post here.
The TFS server keeps track of what each workspace contains1. Any changes made locally with non-TFS client commands (whether tf.exe, Team Explorer or another client) will lead to differences between the TFS Server's view and what actually exist.
The force options on the various clients just gets everything removing such inconsistencies (effectively resetting both what is on the client and what the server thinks is there).
When you perform a get against a specified version (whether date, changeset or label) you get everything up to and including that point in time, whether on not specifically changed at that point. So getting
tf get /version:D2012-03-30
will get changes made on or before that date.
To get only the items included in a changeset you'll have to do some work yourself, using a command to get a listing of the content of a changeset and parse that to perform the right actions (a changeset can include more than just updates and adds of files2).
It seems to me that if you want to perform a build at each changeset affecting a particular TFS folder you would be better off looking at using TFS Build which is all about doing exactly that – avoid reinventing the wheel – and focus on the build part (other continuous build solutions are available).
1 This will change with TFS11 local workspaces.
2 Eg. handing the rename of a folder will take some non-trivial work.
The command will get all the sources for the given changeset. By default it will only get the files that it thinks are different between your workspace and the server. However, by using the /force option you are asking it to get everything regardless of the state it thinks your workspace is in (which is much slower but has the benefit of ensuring your workspace is fully in sync with the server).
So just removing /force will probably achieve what you want.
edit
As I said above, tfs will get all files that it thinks are different from the server. If you manually delete a file from your local workspace, TFS won't know that it is missing from your local version, so it won't think it needs to update the file. There are three solutions to this:
Use /force to make sure things are in sync, and put up with it being very slow.
Don't modify files in your workspace with anything other than TFS tools (tf.exe, Visual Studio, TFS power tool for the explorer shell). You shouldn't just delete files on your local hard drive - if they really need to be deleted, then delete them in source control.
Go offline in TFS before you make changes manually. Then when you go online, TFS will search for all the changes you have made and add them to your pending changes so that TFS is aware of them.
Here's the part I get: When you shelve in TFS, it makes a server copy of the changes so they are not lost, but does not check them into the source code trunk/branch you are working on.
Question: Under what circumstances would you use the "unshelve" feature? Does it mean it will remove the shelveset from the TFS server? Can you do a get from a shelveset? Or is it really just a diff description between the shelveset and the "real" source code?
Unshelving is how you restore the shelveset to your machine so you can keep working on it. It doesn't change the shelveset on the server (to do that you need to shelve things again and use the same shelveset name).
One example for how I use it is to move changes between machines while I'm working on them. I'll shelve it on my desktop machine, then unshelve it on the laptop and then continue working on the laptop.
You can also use it to share changes with someone (for code reviews or other reasons). You shelve your changes, then the other person can go and unshelve it to see what you've done.
Unshelving doesn't actually change the shelveset or anything else on the server. It's just a get operation.
Herms is spot on. Read his answer.
One important caveat: if you've done a Get since the shelveset was created, Unshelve will only rollback the local version of files contained in the shelveset. Thus, it's quite likely you'll have an inconsistent workspace.
A good practice is to always re-run Get after you Unshelve. This ensures you don't waste time on phantom build errors that are actually just side effects of being in a half-new/half-old state. It will also require you to resolve any conflicts between the shelveset contents and the latest server revisions proactively, instead of only discovering them # Checkin time.
I use shelve to back up code-in-progress, just on the off chance my hard drive crashes or whatnot. I don't even have to worry about the code building, never mind working, since the work won't be seen by any other developers on my team (unless they go looking for it).
Unshelve pends the changes back in your workspace. Removing the shelveset from the server is a Delete.
Following on to what Richard Berg said, the power tools' version of unshelve actually includes a get and resolve.
I'm a consultant whose client runs a TFS 2005 repository. I manage my own source code in TFS and deliver my releases to their TFS. My source code is around 20,000 files that I maintain.
My normal process:
Detach my solution from my TFS
Connect to their TFS
Checkout the entire project
Overwrite my project files with
theirs
Check everything back in
Click the add button and add any new
files that have been added
Check everything in
Open the solution file and bind it
to TFS
Check everything back in
The main problem I'm seeing with this approach is if I delete a file on my end, I don't have a way to reflect that change.
I'm also not interested in synchronizing tools because I don't want to synch every checkin, just the current state.
Is there a way I can do this better?
What about maintaining parallel .sln and .proj files with the different bindings? Do they change often?
I think you can maintain change history by using the TFPT ONLINE command from the Team Foundation Power Tools.
Open SLN_A
Make changes (VS auto-checks out against TFS_A)
Before checkin on TFS_A, run TFPT ONLINE against TFS_B. This should pick up adds, edits, deletes.
Checkin SLN_A on TFS_A.
Checkin SLN_B on TFS_B.
Only problem with this might be that the SLN_A checkin could screw up the SLN_B pending changes b/c the files will be returned to read-only. Not sure.
Why do you need to maintain a parallel TFS? Seems like you ought to be working directly against their TFS, either on a branch, via the Proxy, or both.
Have you looked at TimelyMigration? (No affiliation and I've never had need to use it)
TFS to TFS migration