Like a pull request in Git, I'm wanting to produce a similar result through the TFS web portal by comparing changesets, or dates, or whatever mechanism exists. I've found https://www.visualstudio.com/en-us/docs/tfvc/compare-folders-files but it is demonstrated through Visual Studio, rather than through TFS site's project dashboard.
I'm not looking to compare individual files, 1 by 1, but to (again) produce something similar to the diff you'd see in a git pull request, which in my tooling (BitBucket) has a treeview on the left on which you can see changed files, and after choosing a file, seeing on the right a diff between the two states.
If this can't be done in the TFS web portal, and MUST be done in VS, I think the instructions on the above link are probably adequate, as it describes comparing folders between two changesets.
How is this accomplished in TFS world thru web portal? Hope that's not too vague, I don't know the TFS domain language with which to ask.
You want to install git-tfs and git for windows. Then you can browse through all changesets fast and easily with the gitk tool.
For TFVC, you can view changes made in changesets on the "History" view of the "Code" hub.
When you choose a changeset, you'll see all of the changes made as part of that changeset. If you want to compare two changesets (as opposed to comparing current to previous), there's nothing in the web UI.
Related
I’m beginning to consider moving an on-prem TFS 2012 installation to Visual Studio Online. So, one of the first things I started investigating was how we might export our content back out of VSO in the future if we ever decided we needed to. The more I’m looking, the less I’m finding. It seems there was a temporary time period when VSO first went GA that Microsoft offered that capability if you asked to have it done (http://www.visualstudio.com/en-us/news/2014-apr-3-vso.aspx). By implication, that would seem to mean that this isn’t something that is a planned feature of VSO.
Making a commitment to house all of my source and ALM data in a repository I’d effectively be barred from leaving doesn’t sound particularly appealing. Am I missing something, or does Microsoft really not have export capabilities on their VSO product roadmap? It would seem that this would be a show-stopper for many organizations from coming onto VSO, which is a perfect application to put into the cloud IMHO.
For code you can use Git. Even if you start with TFVC, you can use Git-TF. Clone with the --deep parameter to get the full history in a new Git repo, then push back to a new project (Git or TFVC).
For work items the TEAM tab in Microsoft Excel is a very capable export facility for work items, though you don't get links (other than parent child), or attachments.
In the original project, create a query that lists all your work items.
Open Excel, go to the TEAM tab and click 'New List', you should get the option to select your project and the query you just created.
In the Work Items tab select the 'Choose Columns' button and select all the columns you want to migrate.
If migrating to another TFS / VSO project, create that project, open another list in Excel connected to the new project.
Cut and paste all the work items from the original project list to the new project list (excluding the Id column).
Publish.
voilà.
You're right there's no good solution for this yet. However, if you're using Git as the source-control back-end (instead of TFVC), you can easily pull down the entire repo then push it up into any other source control server (non-VSO) with full history.
For TFVC source-control, or work items (or builds, test results, etc), things aren't so easy.
The answer is not black and white: with the TFS Client API you can connect to both platform and read/write as you please. It is not a trivial task, so someone has created tooling, like Brian says. Another option is using the open source TFS Integration Platform: it is complex but with some help you can do it.
What you really must consider and plan is the data model: moving from an ALM Platform to another is never trivial and the complexity lies in the difference of the underlying model and any customization you made.
As long as you do not customize you on-prem TFS, it is very doable, with a reasonable effort to move to VSO and back. In this context customize means: custom workitems fields, types or workflows, server-side plugins; shortly anything that requires code or schema change. Note that you can still customize builds as this is properly managed.
I expect to see more solutions arriving thanks to the new REST API, but it will take time before we see solid products.
So your original question has a positive answer (TFS on-prem -> VSO) using OpsHub, but know what you are doing and, as I write, it is practically a one way journey.
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.
I'm building a tool to integrate with TFS and it needs to properly parse TFS logs (from the tf.exe history command) and checkout different revisions (again using tf.exe). It works great on the test TFS server I have, but I want to test it on a broad range of large repositories to make sure my parsing works properly.
I'd hoped to use Codeplex to get access to TFS repositories, but it seems you only get TFS access to Codeplex projects if you're a project member.
Are there any collections of open source code hosted on public TFS servers? Are there any other publicly available servers I could use for testing?
I would suggest using svn2tfs and choose any relatively active project on SourceForge. There are plenty of projects on SF to choose from that use SVN and not CVS. You might even get a bonus out of it and help the svn2tfs project work out any kinks.
Since you mention tf history command, I assume you want to collect/parse logs on the project's (and its files) history of checkins.
So in addition to large repository, you also need a good amount of history, am I right? If yes, then here's your set of problems:
Most projects on codeplex use Mercurial, not TFS. So even if you get access, you cannot use TFS with them.
As you mentioned, they require you to a be a member for you to access the source.
Even if you get access or find a public server (unlikely), you still would need good amount of history.
If I'm correct in my assumptions so far, here's the easiest (bit tedious though) way out:
Go to any large projects's such as Nuget or Wix
revisions
Download any old revision (go back as far as you want the history for). You can download zipped src files without being a member.
In your test server, checkin the code (src) to create the baseline.
Download the next revision.
Checkout files in your server and overwrite them with the newer revision's files.
While checkin, use the history.txt (sample) to create checkin comments
Repeat this process few times.
Voila!! You now have a large repository with lot of history!
Hope this helps.
Have you tried some of the larger projects on Codeplex?
http://www.codeplex.com
If you only need read access you should be able to play around with the various repositories.
I don't have a huge amount of tfs experience, but I would assume there are migration tools that let you ingest code repositories from other products (e.g svn or hit).
If so, you might want to find a svn/git repo for a sizable foss project, and try importing that.
"I'd hoped to use Codeplex to get access to TFS repositories, but it seems you only get TFS access to Codeplex projects if you're a project member."
This solution appears to be the general consensus amoung SO'rs. I've read some of the Codeplex TFS connection problem threads (you linked to below) and I hope the comments in this thread resolves the issue:
Connecting to Codeplex TFS as a Coordinator or Developer.
I'm wondering if you can use git-tfs project to import an existing Git project into TFS.
Download and install git-tfs
Create a new TFS project
Clone the TFS project to a Git project using git-tfs ("git tfs clone http://tfs:8080/tfs/DefaultCollection $/some_project")
Import a existing Git project of your choice into your fresh new Git project (I don't know the command but I think it's possible).
Use git-tfs to checkin to TFS Server ("git tfs checkintool")
=> Do it makes sense ? And works ?
For more information:
http://lostechies.com/jimmybogard/2011/09/20/git-workflows-with-git-tfs/
Is there a way to look at code differential between previous and current versions of a changeset in TFS 2005/08 through a web-based interface?
I am aware of Changeset.aspx with a artifactMoniker parameter that retrieves the changeset and related files. But I would also like to view the code delta in a web based manner.
This can be achieved in TFS 2008 via the Visual Studio Team System Web Access.
First you need to open an individual Changeset details. This can be done for example by looking at a build (the Builds tab), and selecting one of the changesets associated with the build.
For some reason the version of Web Access I currently have at hand had a bug in that the link into a Changeset webpage is missing the changeset number. A quick manual fix of the URL helped.
This is the URL that is linked to
http://tfsappserver:8090/UI/Pages/Scc/ViewChangeset.aspx?changeseturi=vstfs:///VersionControl/Changeset/8695
Notice I needed to add the changeset parameter manually.
http://tfsappserver:8090/UI/Pages/Scc/ViewChangeset.aspx?changeseturi=vstfs:///VersionControl/Changeset/8695&changeset=8695
The page lists all the code files that has changed and for each file you can compare it with another version. The comparison option is available from dropdown menu on the file.
Here is what it looks like:
We currently are using both Visual Source Safe and Team Foundation Server at work (VSS for old projects, TFS for current or new projects).
We have always used Labels in source control for each build. In VSS if you chose to see a file history you could include labels. In TFS I cannot find an option to include the lables in the history window.
Since one of the most common questions that I get asked by support or management is 'What version did we fix/add/remove/change xxxx?', I have always relied on our build labels showing up in the history.
Can I get Labels to show up in a file history?
In the 2008 version of TFS, you don't see labels in the standard history of files and folders. If you really want to know why - see Brian Harry's blog post "Why TFS Labels are not like VSS Labels".
To find labels in Visual Studio, go to File, Source Control, Label, Find Label... From that you can see what versions of files were included in that label.
The team have definitely heard that this is not ideal, and the next version of TFS (Team Foundation Server 2010, codenamed "Rosario") will include improvements to the History view to make labels easier to find - see http://go.microsoft.com/?linkid=7807943 for the spec of improvements to the History view in TFS 2010.
BTW - I actually moved to changeset based build numbering with TFS which makes labelling less necessary. See http://www.woodwardweb.com/vsts/changeset_based.html for more details.
Hope that helps,
Martin.
This very issue has been killing us.
The best solution I've found is with the use of a third party tool called Team Foundation SideKicks available for free here http://www.attrice.info/cm/tfs/.
Under the "History Sidekick" there is a label tab. You can highlight any folder or file and it will show you every label that was dropped on that folder or file and at what changeset.
Unfortunately you can not see a full view of a folder or file's history with labels included.
Under the "Label Sidekick" you can highlight any specific label at it can tell you what folders/files and changesets are in the label. This functionality is pretty much the same as what is available from within Visual Studio and is not as helpful.
One caveat is the need for a TFS server 2008 or above. Using the tool with TFS server 2005 is painfully slow and basically unusable.
-ephi
[due to the complexity of TFS-style labels this is a quite difficult problem when applied to folders; based on a comment above I'm going to assume searching for labels on a file is sufficient]
Unfortunately this is one of the very few edge cases of the TFS client API that is not exposed anywhere in tf.exe or VS2008. You'll have to call the API directly. Please see http://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/library/bb138967.aspx - the "versionFilterItem" parameter does what you're looking for.
TFS 2010 has a very useful "Labels" view (rather than "Changesets") in the history of any branch. Unfortunately, it only shows labels in the branch you have chosen, rather than labels in all child branches/folders.
I started to play with trying to create my own SQL to do this and run it directly against the TFS database(s) themselves. This SQL was run against TFS 2008. This little snippet will show ALL the labels and changesets for ALL the branches ordered with the most recently created branch/modified label first. The next step in developing this would be to somehow traverse the changesets and the labels to only bring back areas I'm interested in (like 'Main' or some particluar branch). I imagine if I created SQL that would do all of this, it would be dog slow, and wouldn't have the full GUI I want to dive into the history for a particular file, see labels with that, etc. Sigh.
select DisplayName, cs.CreationDate, Comment, 'CheckIn'
from TfsVersionControl.dbo.tbl_Identity i, TfsVersionControl.dbo.tbl_ChangeSet cs
where cs.ownerid = i.IdentityId
union
select DisplayName, LastModified, Comment, 'Label'
from TfsVersionControl.dbo.tbl_Identity i, TfsVersionControl.dbo.tbl_Label l
where l.ownerid = i.IdentityId
order by 2 desc
I've used TFS branch history for this before. It's not the greatest UI in the world and only lets you show history per file but it gets the job done.