I am not familiar with TFS, however the scenario that I will be coming across is that I will have a branch of source code stored in Visual Studio Team Services (was TFS Online) and locally I will be running TFS 2008.
Would there be any issues pulling the code from Team Services and merging with TFS 2008?
You won't be able to bind the code (solution and projects) to 2 different TFS servers. If you're using the online version of TFS what reason would you have of also trying to store the code in a local repository?
You definitely won't be able to merge the code between the different servers. TFS is a centralized version control system and merge operations need to be handled and tracked by the server.
You could theoretically Manage the code in one of the TFS servers (i.e. have the solution bound to TFS online) and manually manage the code in the other server. However TFS 2008 only supports local workspaces which means that it will make files read only if they are not explicitly checked out. This will cause you no end of pain.
Even if you did it the other way round (made the local TFS server the "master") you will almost certainly create yourself a load of problems as TFS simply isn't designed to be used this way
Also TFS 2008 is pretty ancient and unsupported.
EDIT:
The typical TFS workflow is.
Create a development branch on the server.
"Get" the code to a local folder on your dev machine (called a workspace).
"Check out" the files you need to modify from your branch or "Add" new files as needed.
You should regularly "check in" files to your branch to make sure your changes are saved on the server.
When your changes are complete then "merge" the code from the development branch back to the Main branch.
The code is stored and versioned on the server, but your changes are made on your local machine. To interact with the server you use the Team Explorer plugin in Visual Studio. Modern version of Visual Studio have Team Explorer built in.
If you're using the online version of TFS then you'll want to use Visual Studio 2012 or above.
If you're planning on Forking the code and do not plan on committing your changes back to the server, then you're probably better off using something like Git. You could use Git-tf or Git-TFS to pull changes from TFS and then that would make merging a lot easier and you could use your local Git Repo to manage your own changes
Related
I have some projects on TFVC source control on TFS 2010. I want just to migrate the source code from TFS 2010 to TFVC on Azure DevOps Server.
I don't want to process an upgrade of the entire collection to a newest version. I Just want to transfer my code with history.
I tried Git-TFS. I cloned my repository on TFS 2010, but I don't know how I can update the remote URL for TFVC repos and push on Azure DevOps Server.
Any ideas how I can do it? Or other tools that I can use?.
In the case I decide to migrate without history how can I do it?
Thanks.
git-tfs is a two-way bridge between TFS (Team Foundation Server) and git, similar to git-svn. It fetches TFS commits into a git repository, and lets you push your updates back to TFS.
If you want to move code from TFVC on TFS2010 to TFVC on Azure DevOps 2019 and keep history.
You have to do the upgrade process of entire project collection.
In the case I decide to migrate without history how can I do it
You could just create corresponding new team projects and workspaces. Pull down your source code from your TFS2010 workspaces/projects. Copy and paste source code files/folders in new workspace. Then check in them back to Azure DevOps Server 2019.
We advise you keep preview TFVC repository of 2010 online but read-only to view history.
Same with Azure DevOps Service, hope this helps.
Disclaimer: I'm the last maintainer of the git-tfs tool (even if I no more work on it)
Git-tfs could be used to migrate from TFVC to git (with history and branches if your history is not too complex).
But in no way it could be used to push this history to another empty TFVC project.
So don't expect something from here.
Fun fact (not so fun for you) :
To prevent regression developing git-tfs, I created a TFVC project on Codeplex used to run smoke tests in a Continuous Integration job.
When Microsoft decided to close Codeplex, I contacted a guy working in the source control team inside Microsoft to help me migrate from Codeplex to Azure Devops (at the time called VSTS) which is the problem you try to solve.
I don't know if they put a lot of effort into this but no one was able give me a solution. The only thing they think about was to use git-tfs, that I confirm you is not able to do it!
That could give you an idea of the problem you're trying to solve...
Ps: that also show that TFVC is not an enough flexible source control and their is a much higher added value to migrate to git (like nearly everyone is doing it...)
Have an in house TFS server that employees use (using TFVC) and third-party contractors that are using VisualStudio Team Services (aka Visual Studio Online or VSO) (also using TFVC). Need to keep the two synced; projects in VSO get merges from check-ins from TFS and TFS get merges from VSO. The TFS instance has many dozen projects and the VSO instance has two or three of those in TFS.
Any suggestions appreciated.
While there are a few tools that can "sync" between different TFVC instances, it's very hard to keep the flow going and you often run into merge conflicts and other problems. The TFS Integration tools were an official solution from Microsoft, but those have been deprecated.
Given that you're on TFS 2017 and VSTS, I'd highly recommend switching to Git repositories. Git was made to handle scenarios like these, to have multiple hosts that need to share the history and from which you need to be able to sync sources across.
Both TFS 2017 and VSTS can host the repository for you and it's relatively easy to setup CI builds that sync the sources between branches on both instances to trigger pull requests.
I found articles on GIT back up and restore but I did not find any on Microsoft TFS Scheduled backup for GIT version control.
This document describes on how TFS's traditional versioning can be scheduled for automatic back up. Configure a backup schedule and plan for Team Foundation Server
However, I did not find any link where I can read that "GIT repository is also included in schedule". I am not a TFS expert and I do not have access to TFS server to verify in person. So any help is appreciated.
The tutorial you are refer which is Scheduled Backups tool. It' a build-in tool on the Scheduled Backups page in the TFS Administration console.
It' the whole database back up not only referring to source control, but also work items, pull requests, builds, test plans or anything else that the service offers.
As a limitation, you need both an administrator for TFS and a member of the SQL Server System Administrators group.
And no need to to verify in person, it's under SQL server, when you want to use the backup, just restore the database.
If you are actually using the online VSTS . For now there is no build-in tool and got a uservoice:
Provide a backup service for Visual Studio Team Services
https://visualstudio.uservoice.com/forums/330519-visual-studio-team-services/suggestions/5339461-provide-a-backup-service-for-visual-studio-team-se
However if you just want a git repository(source code) back up, you could use some 3rd-party tool to achieve this:
We use the VSO Rest API to query our VSO account and get all the data
we need. Since in VSO you can only have one Team Project Collection,
we retrieve all the team projects of the default collection. Each of
these team projects can have multiple repositories that need to be
backed up. A folder is created for each team project and saved to a
location on disk that can be configured in the app.config. When the
team project folder is created, the task loops over each repository in
the team project and creates folders for each repository.
Source Link
You can also fork it on GitHub here. Certainly, you should also be able to use this for on-premise TFS also use the API, just need to change some part.
TFS is implemented the way to keep Git repositories in the SQL Server database, too. Thus, when you follow the instructions from the article you reference, the source code will also be included in the backup, no difference whether it is TFVC or Git.
I have 2 different TFS repositories (one using Visual Studio Online and another using my own local on premise TFS instance) which I want to keep in sync using git-tfs. How do I need to set things up so that I can work locally in git and push changes up to both repositories? Please note both TFS repositories are using TFSVC.
As the main developer of git-tfs, believe me, that's not possible...
Git-tfs can only manage one TFVC repository.
Short answer: Not support.
If you want to sync Visual Studio Online and local TFS. You can use the TFS Integration Tools to setup a unidirectional sync, that should allow you to ensure that a TeamProject on your local TFS system remains in sync. However, they are complicated to setup and will be painfull to run. And There are commercial options that are ridiculously expensive, like OpsHub.
I have the following TFS upgrade scenario: I'd like to change my current TFS 2010 environment to TFS 2012 - this by moving the 2010 server to a new machine with another computer name.
Therefore I simply use the backups of the TFS 2010 databases from the old server and restore them on the new server. Before starting the backup I will turn off several TFS specific services on the old machine to avoid check-ins from devs. In the meantime the developers are working in offline mode. Afterwards I'm going to upgrade the databases.
Now it's getting interesting: The TFS 2012 is up and running with the upgraded project collections and everything works smoothly, but what happens to the local workspaces which are linked to the old TFS url? Is it possible that the developers can switch their exisiting workspaces with their pending changes to the new TFS 2012 url?
If yes, how can I do that? I've already did a test installation and upgraded to 2012 successfully, but I can't find out how to bind my existing workspaces with my pending changes to the new TFS. Initially I thought that the "Change Source Control" dialog could do the trick, but everything I'm able to click in the toolbar are the "Bind/Unbind" and "Refresh" buttons...
If no, I guess I have 2 options:
All I can do is forcing everyone to check-in/shelve and create a new mapping for the new server
OR
simply keeping the old TFS name/url? (Are the pending changes still available in this case?)
Thank you in advance!
P
Workspaces are stored on the server, so when the users add the new server they should find their old workspace already setup for them. Complete with all their existing checkouts etc.
If this doesn't work for a user, they can map a new workspace to the same directory, checkout all files in the tree, then use the tfs power tools do to a uncheckout unchanged (tpft uu /noget) to only leave their changed files checked out.