I always understood that best practice was never to check into TFS binary (e.g., bin and obj) files.
A while ago, someone in our implementation of TFS did not adhere to this, and checked in the bin and obj folders.
Thereafter, when I try to GLV code to a new machine, TFS downloaded all the project folders including items such as bin, obj, Debug etc and temp files like .dll, .cache, pdb. Then, when I run Clean Solution, TFS removes such files inside these folders, but then, when I Build, I get errors that there are dll files missing in obj\Debug folder.
To fix this, I then took the following steps:
I undid current changes so that TFS had nothing checked out.
I deleted the bin and obj folders from Source Control Explorer within TFS.
I checked it.
Such folders seemed to disappear from TFS, and I thought the problem was solved.
However, after that, when I GLV on the same machine, then Clean, then Build, then check-in recursively from the root of the TFS workspace, TFS automatically adds the dll’s and other extension like .cache files in those folders back into TFS! And we are back to square one.
So, should I try to prevent such files being checked in, or is there a way for all those files to be stored inside TFS without then causing me compilation errors??
Also, if best practice is to avoid checking in the bin and obj folders, how to I check in recursively from my local drive, after building, without checking in the bin and obj folders? Is there a way to exclude certain folder or file types?
Add a .tfignore file to the repo root so that those folders are not tracked by source control.
bin
obj
should be enough.
Related
I have followed all of the guidance around using tfignore files and VS still insists on checking in contents from these folders. Is there some other way to go about this? I'm getting really tired of excluding these things before every checkin.
Still use .tfignore file.
If the changes are "still" in pending changes, first create a backup
copy, then make an Undo on them. Close VS, restore the backup copies
and then it should work.
Or you can also use a temporary quick fix for this problem: Add an $ char into the bower_components folder name in the .bowerrc. TFS does not allow the $ character in the file name, so it can't be added to source control.
More details, please see my and Hoppe's answer in vs2015 keeps adding project.lock.json to tfs
Another way through source control.
You could try to remove the directory from source control(not delete), check in; and then delete the files/dir from Source Control Explorer and check-in in Source Control Explorer. Now TFS doesn't know about the files and won't compare them because they are not source controlled . Or you can also give a try with Nate Kerkhofs's answer in How do I permanently exclude the bin and obj folders from TFS 2012 checkin?
using VS 2012 and TFS, and I cannot exclude the packages and bin folders from the check-in process, unless I manually exclude them every time. I have created a tfignore file using the VS interface which specifies folders and also file types (e.g. *.nupkg, *.dll etc) but it doesn't work. They still appear in the Team Explorer check in process, and it's causing problems. Please help, it's really annoying me.
is your workspace a local or server one? .tfignore works only on local workspaces.
Have you checked existing SO threads, e.g. How to ignore files/directories in TFS for avoiding them to go to central source repository?
If the problem still exists please describe exactly how you add files to tfs (pend add)
This is a weird problem I keep facing. I sometimes find that files that have been excluded in TFS are included and thus each time I check-in, these files that were previously excluded risks getting pushed into the server.
This kind of problem happens most often when I restart my machine. What am I doing wrong?
If you right click on a solution, project, or folder to check-in you are automatically calling "include" on that structure recursively. If you want to permanently exclude those files you can put a .tfignore file in there.
http://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/library/ms245454.aspx
Just started up Visual Studio 2012 and opened my solution which is in source control with Team Foundation Server 2012 Express and encountered this, any ideas? Can't get latest, can't check in, everything appears checked out :( Basically my workspace is unusable right now.
TF400018: The local version table for the local workspace MY-PC;My
User could not be opened. The workspace version table contains an
unknown schema version.
There is only one post I could find on the net, and the answers are pretty vague.
I had the same issue, and I just fixed it on mine.
If you don't mind re-map all your projects, you can try follow:
Click the box in "Workspace".
Click on "Workspaces".
Delete the workspace profile you're currently using
Re-connect to TFS open "Source Control"
Be aware that you may lose all your TFS mappings, you may need to re-map all your projects from TFS. Backup your changes that not checked in yet.
cycle6 is correct, but it isn't clear that you will not lose your pending check-in list if you follow some additional steps.
Click the box labelled "Workspace".
Click on "Workspaces".
Delete the corrupt workspace profile, accepting the warning.
Re-connect to TFS and open "Source Control Explorer"
Create a new workspace
One by one, map your projects to the same folder as before
You will be presented with a list of conflicts, where you have matching writable files in the folder already.
Choose "Keep local copy" for each file you had checked out before, and "Take Server Version" for any files changed by other members of the team that you didn't have the latest version for. This might take a while depending on the length of the list, but it is worth comparing versions for any file you are unsure of.
You will be left with your solution and all pending items marked as checked out, with your work preserved.
I did the following steps and it solved the issue:
deleted the hidden folder named $tfs and then
in the Visual Studio, Solution Explorer: Right click on the solution node > the Source Control > Get Specific version > latest version
If you already have multiple instances of Visual Studio open.
Close all of them . [in some cases you need to log out from windows & log back in OR restart ]
Rename the $tf folder with any other name (eg. $tft)
Start Visual Studio, to see your issue fixed. :)
Hope this helps.
Sometimes this happens when you are running out of disk space.
Try to see if you have very low space, eg. < 10 MB.
If that so, try to clean up your windows Temp folder. See if that solve this issue
It's a misleading message to an extent.
What has happened is that the internal data structures of the workspace have become corrupt.
The ends up as the code (in the tf command, Visual Studio, et al.) to load those data structures failing to load from the relevant files, which becomes an error about a schema version problem.
In the case that I experienced, this was because the machine hosting the workspace ran out of disc space while doing operations upon the workspace of various kinds (check-outs, check-ins, adding pending changes — it was actually a bunch of workspaces being used by TFS 2017 build agents and multiple active builds).
This corrupted parts of the data that are held in the files under the hidden $tf subdirectory (it always being a local workspace on a TFS 2017 build agent), because source control wasn't able to rewrite/extend these files.
Other answers here discuss partly retaining some of the files, based upon more specific knowledge of what has not been corrupted (such as preserving the internal files storing pending changes if one wasn't creating any pending changes), but the basic idea is that one needs to reset all of the stuff in $tf to a sane state of some kind.
In my case, I had the disadvantage of multiple potential causes and no consistent knowledge of which parts of $tf were corrupted, but I conversely had some advantages:
It being a TFS build, arranged to build from the build agent's s (source) directory into its a (artifact staging) and b (binaries) directories, there were not masses of non-source-controlled object and other files in the workspace (which is the s directory) that would have ended up as pending additions.
There were not any pending changes (to actual source files) worthwhile to preserve. I could afford to lose all information about source files, and indeed all current locally-stored information about the workspace, and simply run the build again with a fresh sane and largely unpopulated workspace. I did not even need to restore source files and directories for the whole workspace, as the first task in any TFS ("vNext") build is a "Get Sources" task that uses (variously) tf vc scorch, tf vc undo, and tf vc get to check out the right source version.
So simply, in Developer PowerShell (Visual Studio being installed on the build machine):
Remove-Item -Recurse -Force 'X:\Agents\07\_work\1138\s'
tf vc get 'X:\Agents\07\_work\1138\s'
(Note that one can always get at the tf command in some way on a TFS build machine. Every build agent has a local helper copy of tf.exe and its ancillary DLLs in its VSTS "OM" subdirectory.)
I possibly could have omitted the tf vc get step, but having had trouble with "Get Sources" in the past I do not trust it to robustly cope with arbitrary manual external alterations, such as no s directory when the build isn't configured to outright delete that entire directory itself (as it can be but was not here).
For the same reason, Microsoft's own "agent maintenance" (another way to clean things up) is quite dodgy, and ends up leaking workspaces on the TFS server (which I have raised a bug with Microsoft about).
There is simple workaround. Remove local mapping to folder where is the sources (Advanced -> Remove Mapping, or just rename or delete mapped folder. After that you will be able to connect to tfs. Download the project again.
If you already have multiple tfs instances of Visual Studio open.
1.) Open File -> Source Control -> Manage Workspaces
2.) Delete all tfs map
3.) Then select folder maps
For the same issue in eclipse: Find the folder $tf and delete it.
You will find the $tf folder in the workspace directory. If not then search for the $tf folder.
Once you have found it, delete it.
In my case, none of the other answers helped - the problem was occurring on a machine that didn't have Visual Studio and no matter how I tried to get rid of the bad workspace data it never worked. After working with procmon a bit, I discovered another critical folder that might be the source of this error: C:\Users\All Users\Microsoft Team Foundation Local Workspaces\ (it might also be under C:\ProgramData (on my system, 'All Users' is a symlink to that folder, but not sure if this is typical.) In this folder there are sub-folders named like guids that contain some other folders, one per workspace it appears. In my case, some of the data in these folders was old and some was corrupt. Once I deleted the bad workspace folders, all my problems disappeared. You might also want to delete the Cache folder as identified in the comments of this post, but that didn't help me (didn't seem to hurt though, either.)
Alternatively, you could just backup your current workspace to a different location, re-create your workspace, and copy the files back that you had made changed to. VS should detect the newest files and automatically check out these files allowing you to check in the newer versions that you copied back from your backup.
What worked for me is, delete the local folder(s), restart your machine, then map the projects again. Any pending changes you have just save them somewhere else temporarily.
We have multiple config files (app.DEV.config, app.TEST.config, etc) and a pre-build event that copies the correct config file to app.config. Obviously the configuration specific files are in source control --- but at the moment so is App.Config, and that shouldn't be.
How can I mark that one file as excluded from source control, but obviously not from the project.
I'm using VS 2005, and 2005 Team Explorer.
It's easy in TFS2012, create a .tfignore file
http://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/library/tfs/ms245454%28v=vs.110%29.aspx#tfignore
######################################
# Ignore .cpp files in the ProjA sub-folder and all its subfolders
ProjA\*.cpp
#
# Ignore .txt files in this folder
\*.txt
#
# Ignore .xml files in this folder and all its sub-folders
*.xml
#
# Ignore all files in the Temp sub-folder
\Temp
#
# Do not ignore .dll files in this folder nor in any of its sub-folders
!*.dll
# EDIT https://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/library/ms245454(v=vs.110).aspx#tfignore
# A filespec is recursive unless prefixed by the \ character.
Select the App.config file in Solution Explorer, and choose File -> Source Control -> Exclude App.config from Source Control.
There is a checkin policy (Forbidden Patterns Policy) in the MS Power Tools which lets you screen filenames against a regular expression. See: Microsoft Team Foundation Server Power Tools
While checkin policies are not completely foolproof, they are the closest thing TFS has to enforcing user-defined rules like what you're looking for.
(And as the others have said, you can also cloak a file or folder, which means it stays in Source Control and is visible to everyone else on the team, but it's not copied to your PC until you decide to uncloak it; or you can delete the file, which means it gets deleted from everybody's PCs when they get latest - but neither of these options will prevent such files being added to source control in the first place)
There is an option that is hard to find:
1. Select the file or multiple files in Solution Explorer
2. Go to File -> Source Control -> Advanced
and here it is
Keep in mind:
If you right click a file in Solution Explorer you only find "the most important options" not all :)
If all you want is to have a file in the project but not under source control with TFS, just go into SourceControl, delete the said file, and undo your checkout of the project file (it will attempt to remove the file from the project as well). Then check-in your delete of the file you are excluding. In the solution explorer you should see that there is no source control icon next to the file you're excluding. The project file should list a file there, but that file should now no longer be under source control.
Keep in mind, any other person will now see a missing file in the project when they get latest.
TFS allows you to cloak at the folder/file level. When something is cloaked, TFS won't attempt to sync it (much like a svn:ignore).
When setting up your workspace, cloak anything you want TFS to ignore. A more detailed how-to is here.
This worked for me:
One way is to add a new or existing item to a project (e.g. right click on project, Add Existing Item or drag and drop from Windows explorer into the solution explorer), let TFS process the file(s) or folder, then undo pending changes on the item(s). TFS will unmark them as having a pending add change, and the files will sit quietly in the project and stay out of TFS.
Source:
=">How can I exclude a specific files from TFS source control
Visual Studio 2013 (and 2012)
This feature is available by selecting the file(s) and going to:
File > Source Control > Advanced > Exclude ... from Source Control
This question was asked a while ago but it pertains to the same type of issue I was having.
The Problem:
We want to check in our code.
We then want build our project.
During our build we depend on Build Events to move files around so we have the proper files in place for the build process to complete.
When our Build Event tries to copy the files, we get Access Denied errors.
The Reason:
Team Foundation Server Visual Studio Plugin changes the Read Only attribute on our files to READONLY TRUE when we check in our files.
Build Event Example:
copy "$(TargetDir)SomeFile.ext" "$(ProjectDir)"
Above, we simply need to move a file from our Target Build Path (the bin\debug or bin\release folders) to our Project Folder. In my situation, this was so I could include project built files in my installer. My Installer wasn't grabbing them as part of the Project Output.
The Fix: (nearly kicked my self in the face when I figured this out)
New Build Event:
attrib -R "$(ProjectDir)SomeFile.ext"
copy "$(TargetDir)SomeFile.ext" "$(ProjectDir)"
attrib +R "$(ProjectDir)SomeFile.ext"
We're all having fun with Build Events right? Above I simply do 2 things, I remove the read only attribute, now the files not read only. Copy my file as I was originally wanting to. Then replace the Read Only Attribute (optional I guess) to keep Visual Studio and Team Foundations happy.
And yes... I'm still kicking myself in the face on this one.
I have a similar issue, my App.config contained sensible data (e.g. username) that this data should not by sync with TFS.
The article Best practices for deploying passwords and other sensitive data to ASP.NET and Azure App Service describes an good approach to prevent this issue:
Use the "file" attribute of the "appSettings" element to reference an config file that is not added to source-control
If you have an older version than TFS2012 and thus can't create a .tfignore file or use the File > Source Control > Advanced > Exclude … option, you can try this:
Make a copy of the target file in Windows Explorer.
Undo Pending Changes (if any) on the target file in Team Explorer/Visual Studio.
Delete the target file in Windows Explorer.
Move the copy of the target file to the location of the deleted target file, and rename it so it has the same name as the deleted target file.
TFS now seems to ignore the changes in the target file. If you need to edit the file again, don't use Visual Studio, as TFS will then put the file back in the list of files with Pending Changes.
You can just simply select the file from your Source Control Explorer and Right Click on it, and the select the "Rename" option from there, and you can add ".exclude" at the end of the file name.
And then do remember to check-in the file, and after that you can see that your file is excluded from Source Control.