I need help to understand the working of 'Checkout for edit' in Team foundation server.
Right click on the Project/File --> Choose the option 'Check Out For Edit'.
Help me to understand this option.
When you want to edit a file you can open it from Solution Explorer or from Source Control Explorer. When you begin editing a file, it is automatically checked out to you.
In rare situations (for example, you want to check out and lock the file to make sure your changes are checked in before changes from other team members), you might need to manually (right click -> check out for edit) check out (and optionally lock) an item.
What is "lock"?
When you press on "Checkout for edit" and "lock" you till get Lock type menu:
Unchanged: Do not apply a lock to the items.
Check Out: Prevent other users from checking out and checking in the items until you check in and unlock them.
Check In: Allow other users to check out the items you are checking out, but prevent them from checking in their changes until you check in your changes and unlock the items.
Important: As a best practice, use the Lock type option with
discretion and notify your teammates why you are locking an item, and
when you plan to remove the lock.
Related
We are trying to follow the branching strategy from the TFS Branching Guide and have reached the point where we have made a branch representing a release, which should now be made read-only.
In the Properties|Security tab for the branch, it presents six user groups each with 10 permissions other than Read. Do I have to go through and click Deny on 60 check boxes, or is there a better way to make this branch read-only?
Right-click the branch in the Source Control Explorer, and select the Lock... option
EDIT:
This seems to get missed a lot when people are finding this so I'll make it more obvious.
Locks appear as a "pending change" for the person who locked the item. As long as the lock is in effect, it will appear as a pending change. When a commit is made of that pending change, the lock is released. While the lock is in effect, the locked branch is effectively read-only, since (to simplify) the locker is the only user who can make commits. The act of committing is what releases any locks on the branch.
h/t #AakashM for pointing that out in the comments
As a quick-n-dirty, you could Lock it for Check Out (although the locker would have to remember to keep the lock in their pending changes forever... which makes me think there's a better way)
To answer the 2nd part of the question -- removing or denying the Read permission effectively denies everything else.
As is mentioned above locking is not a very nice strategy. The correct way of handling this is setting permissions.
You can effectively make files readonly. Users trying to modify the files will get a message 'checkout denied'
https://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/library/ms252587.aspx#project_level
In VS2013: Team Explorer -> Settings -> Security/Version Control
Deny Check In for domain\domain users
If you have inheritance set to 'On', the best way I've found is to:
'Deny' all permissions except 'Read' to the 'Reader' group, and
Add all other groups (except Project Administrators) to the 'Reader' group.
Then, all groups within the Reader group will inherit the 'Deny' permissions and not be able to do anything but read.
As part of a maintenance, I was about to Lock several now-obsolete TeamProjects, by right-clicking on each one's root in Source Control Explorer ($/TeamProject) and selecting "Lock..".Once I was done, I tried to commit these changes, which was denied with the following message:
By searching around I bumped into the following statement, made as part of this discussion:
Locks are applied such that the user who places the lock can
checkin/checkout files but noone else can until the lock is released.
So as a more valid test you will need another user to attempt a
check-in of a locked file - ie not you because you put the lock on.
If this statement stands, using 'Lock' was all together not what I should have gone for. What I actually need is to close down older TeamProjects so that no checkouts can occur anymore. How do I do that?(I suppose I could include in my changeset a misc code change, but I 'd go for something like this only if there were no other options available)
As I understand selecting Lock allows you to check out the file in isolation. But doing so will show the project in pending changes window. And i guess this is not what you want.
Team Project Collections can be stopped from the TFS Administration console, however this functionality is not available for individual team Projects, you can vote for this feature here ... http://visualstudio.uservoice.com/forums/121579-visual-studio/suggestions/2485699-make-it-possible-to-disable-team-project
You could right click the team project and select security, change the permissions for the users to read only so they have no check in permissions.
HTH
Is there a way to deactivate a project in TFS? (not delete, just deactivate so nobody can checkout or checkin)
This is more of a precaution rather than a hard enforcement. We have a project that was branched but was recently merged to a trunk. This project is no longer in use and I don't want anyone to accidentally use it by checking in/out any of its content. It will eventually be deleted when we have tested the merge completely
In Team Explorer, right click on the project and bring up Team Project Settings -> Group Membership. Go through each group, click Properties, and remove all users and groups from each group. This should prevent anyone who doesn't have a TFS administrator role from being able to check the code out. It may even prevent TFS administrators from being able to check it out without first adding themselves back to the correct project group.
I think this will work, but you should try it as I've never actually done it.
If you still want the project to be available, somebody could just put a lock on the project to prevent check-ins and check-outs. It will remained locked by the user who locks it until either the user unlocks it or their workspace is deleted. An admin can also unlock it using tf.exe.
You can lock a project, branch, folder, or file by right clicking on it and selecting the Lock option from the context menu (note: what you are locking has to exist physically on your drive). This page describes the various types of locks you can place on an item.
For work, I wrote a plug-in to automatically place a check-out lock on production branches once certain criteria are met. The lock is held by the account running the TFS services (in our case, Network Service). Nobody can check-out or check-in files in these branches until somebody uses tf.exe to unlock the branch.
Warning - newbie question....
I had a vision that I could select what workitem I was working on, and when I checked in the code, I could associate the changeset with the workitem automatically.
I'm assuming that:
I would select a work item and state that I'm starting to work on it,
make my changes to the code base as I see fit,
each time a file is checked out, it is associated with the current work item, and
when I check in I can state that I've stopped working on that work item.
Then if I review a work item, I can see what changeset is associated with that workitem, getting the full fidelity of what changes were made for that specific work item.
Is this possible? Is it automatic? All that I have found so far is a manual association of a changeset with a work item.
The order is: make changes, choose pending changes to check-in, select work item, do check-in. You can enable a check-in policy that forces the change to associate with a work item.
Update
With TFS2012/TFS2013 Premium and Ultimate there is a much cooler way, using the "My Work" page. Before you start coding you select a work item from "Available Work Items" to "In Progress". From there you can directly jump to the "Pending Changes" page by clicking "Check In". It is also possible to suspend your work where the state of the IDE is saved.
Demo: http://go.microsoft.com/fwlink/?LinkID=251849
What you're asking for is not a good idea. That pretty much only allows you to work on one work item per team project at a time. If you can do that, then you must be living a quiet life.
Instead, TFS allows you to associate a changeset with one or more work items - when you create the changeset. This makes it easy to see exactly which code changes were made in order to address a particular work item.
It also allows automated builds to be associated with work items, and enables Test Impact analysis. I don't think any of these things would make sense if you were simply associating a work item with the code you assumed you were going to have to change to address it.
Actually at the project level you can enable "require work item" with checkin. This means that the work item be defined first so that you have somthing to associate with when a checkin takes place.
TFS shows some pending changes under my name, but I have not changed anything. When I check in and see View Pending changes, I see some of the changes which I have never made, changes pending under some other user might be shown as my pending changes. When I unselect and check-in my changes, these are still locked under my name? Is this due to auto-checkout or any other reason? (TFS policy requires a compile before check-in)
This is probably due to the automatic checkout feature in TFS.
TFS uses an atomic check-in process and is very careful about recording who did what. When you start editing a file (or the IDE edits one on your behalf, for example a .csproj or .vbproj file) then the file will show up in your pending changes list to show you that you have the file checked out with an edit pending.
To see your pending changes list, go to View, Other Windows, Pending Changes in Visual Studio.
To check-in any pending changes you can right click on the file in solution explorer or you can select it in the pending changes view. Only then will the change be committed into version control. From the pending changes view you can compare with the server version to see what changes you have made.
To see the changes that have been committed to the server you can right click on a file or folder and select "View History".
If you want to remove the pending change and restore the file to what it was before you edited it you can right click on the file and select "Undo Pending Changes".
If you want to change the auto check-out behaviour to prompt you before it performs a check-out, then go to Tools, Options, Source Control, Environment and change the Checked-in items for Saving and Editing to "Prompt for check out" rather than the default which is "Check out automatically".
Hope that helps,
Martin.
I've had a similar issue; TFS still says I've got pending changes that when I compare declares as being identical. This post comes up with a way to prune out all the identical ones and to leave you with only the files that actually have changed.
The problem might have to do with different workspaces that you use or have used possibly on different computers. Check the workspaces that exist and see if the files are checked out anywhere else. Here the sidekick tool mentioned in a comment can help.