When viewing a whole shelveset diff in TFS Web Access, the largest source files are accompanied with a yellow bar that says "Displayed content is truncated due to maximum viewable content limit."
When I click on that single large file to see just its diff, I get another yellow bar. This time it says "The file contents were truncated since they exceeded the maximum file content length. Browse to the individual files to download full content."
Okay, maybe this tool just won't show large files to me.
How do I "browse to the individual files" as the yellow bar suggests? Will that give me both versions that I need to diff (shelved and unmodified)?
Is the size limit configurable anywhere?
Is there any way to use TFS Web Access with a
user configurable diff tool? (I would have many other good uses for that.)
The only workaround I am aware of is to open Visual Studio, painfully look up the shelveset, and view it using my configured diff tool which doesn't care whether the source files are obese or not.
I'm using TFS version 12.0.30324.0.
If you select just a single file you should get a download button. Clicking this will retrieve just that single file in it's entirety.
On non-shelvesets it's next to the edit button, but I dought that edit is available on shelvesets.
After asking, I discovered some other ways to search and found out that this limitation is specific to TFS 2012 and unpatched TFS 2013. Maybe this helps someone.
(This does not solve my own problem as I cannot quickly achieve TFS server upgrade so I'm still interested in a better answer. I'd like to extend my knowledge of TFS Web Access and I found the online resources lacking.)
Related
I know I can look at the "Source Control - Team Foundation" output in the Output window but it's hard to tell where the results from the current request begin and the last request ended sometimes, and any files that I want to compare that are in the list I have to go look up.
In the past when I used subversion, I had a tool (I think tortoise) that did an awesome job showing me all the files that were changed and I could click directly on them to compare with latest version. I would often use this to do quick code reviews, and it made it much easier to make sure I wasn't about to get an updated project file that had been improperly merged.
Are there any extensions/plugins or anything that can help with this for TFS when getting latest?
Unfortunately there isn't such a tool can exactly achieve that, there is a user voice submitted here, and it's ARCHIVED.
Based on my experience, the best thing to do is a folder comparison before you get the latest version. In Source Control Explorer, you can compare the differences between two server folders, two local folders, or a server folder and a local folder. Right click on the target folder and select Compare. Read more here.
To see the changes block you can introduce the third compare tools. (e.g BeyondCompare, ExamDiff, Code Compare etc, you can reference my answer in another thread : Visual Studio TFVC Merge Lines Misaligned). In short you can get the change list from Output window, then compare each file accordingly.
Besides, you can also try using the Tf Command Line Utility and the Visual Studio extension Diff All Files for VS2013. Reference this thread for details : TFS Shortcut to do a diff on all modified files with latest version
Does a feature like "TFS auto-checkout before checkin" exist, so that I don't checkout any file until the moment I say "checkin", e.g. in case I only change files temporarily - which happens all the time.
In other words, client-side I want to work as if using subversion, regardless of what the TFS server might think. This must be possible, I just wonder if it is easy to setup.
In yet other words, until and unless I say 'checkin', other users shouldn't (be able to) bother what files I'm editing.
These answers are fine assuming you always work in Visual Studio. But imagine the scenario of editing a bunch of files outside of Visual Studio and you want to use Windows Explorer TFS powertools to automatically checkout files which were just modified. Well, there is no automatic checkout. What I ended up doing was to sort the files by the "Date Modified" column and then individual selecting the modified files only. You can't select any files which might be added, as the TFS power tool Windows extension will grey out the "Check Out for Edit.." The other frustration is that TFS power tools doesn't have a file icon to differentiate if a file is currently checkout or simply not yet added to TFS. Basically, TFS is terrible working with more than file at a time unless you are exclusively working within VS, but who does that.
SVN kicks TFS when it comes to this type of scenario.
You can tell Visual studio not to check out on edit, go to tools, options, source control, environment. Then select the behaviour you want. If you choose editing to "do nothing" and saving to "prompt for checkout" it should be pretty close to what you want.
You could also look at svnBridge which allows you to use TortoiseSVN with TFS. I assume that the point of svnBridge is to allow developers used to SVN to use TFS without having to change the way they work, so it should meet your needs.
A combination of both of these should get you close.
From time to time I hear from people who dislike the automatic check out behaviour common with TFS. One of the great things about TFS is the the pending changes list that shows you the files you have currently checked out and allows you to easily undo any un-intentional check outs. While I personally find the auto-checkout features a productivity boon - like most things there is a preference that you can use to adjust the default behaviour if you find it causes problems with the way you like to work.
In Visual Studio 2008 (with the Team Explorer 2008 installed), 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".
No. When you check in TFS will checkin those files, you have to just undo those files.
However checking out a file doesn't stop others from checking them out, unless you've locked them. This non exclusive locking is the default behaviour.
No. But you can do one thing - Open solution in 2 Visual Studio, One in which solution is Online and another in which solution is offline. Do all your changes/work on Offline solution. After completing your task.
Go to first VS (Online) and checkout the files containing your changes.
Go to Second VS (Offline, containing your changes) - It will prompt for file changes and click "No to All" so that all your changes persist.
Press Save All.
First Solution (Online) will prompt for new changes and click "Yes To All" so that all your changes done in offline mode will get in new files.
Get Latest. - Any conflicting changes will be reflected (Try automerge - if you're lucky will work perfectly)
CHECK-IN
Though a tedious task but a workout for your question.
I have to use Team Foundation Server 2010 at my company and I'm not very happy with it.
There are so many features or just default behavior I'd expect from a CVS that TFS seems to lack (compared to svn, git or perforce, which I have experience with), so my question is: which tricks do you know, which hidden features are out there to make TFS easier to use / more convenient?
Perhaps I should elaborate a bit and list what I think could be better:
The default check-in action when associated with a task is "resolve", though in 99% of all check-ins, I only want to "associate" my commit with the task. There's only 1 commit (the last) that "resolves" the task, so why is that the default? Can I change that?
In the check-in dialog, when double-clicking a file, Notepad is launched and shows the contents of the file. Notepad. Seriously? What about the Visual Studio editor? Anyway, I'd like to see the differences to review the changes I've made, not the contents of the file. The diff tool is hidden in a submenu. This might seem trivial, but when I have to check 10+ files it's just annoying to always right-click, open submenu, click to diff.
The diff tool. Merging with it isn't really straightforward, also the conflict detection mechanism is somewhat lacking. The (Tortoise-)SVN / Git merge tools or that of Perforce are way better here.
Speed. Creating a new file, opening a file for the first time, comparing a file with a previous version etc takes forever (that is, 3-10+ seconds). Our TFS server is in-house and has absolutely no load - also why does Visual Studio have to contact the TFS server when I just create a new file (which I might not even check in)? Is there perhaps an option to turn that off?
Readonly files. All files are read-only when checked-in and become writeable when edited for the first time. This is really annyoing when the application crashes because of that. Windows Azure for example modifies a web.config file and fails whenever I check out because the file is read-only then.
These are just the most prominent things that I think are really annoying and unnecessary.
I didn't have the pleasure to branch and merge yet, but from what I've heard so far it won't be very enjoyable as well...
So again: If you know some tricks, settings, featuers that make working with TFS less inconvenient, please share them.
1) is customizable if you reconfigure the work items. (You can also change any combination of fields/states/available values/etc.)
2) is a pain, but if you use the dockable "Pending Changes" window instead then it'll open the file in the editor. I suspect this is a drawback of the Checkin dialogue being modal.
3) you can customize - the option's a little tucked away, but it's on Tools/Options dialogue under Source Control/Visual Studio Team Foundation Server/Configure User Tools. Some third party tools (like BeyondCompare) have pages on their website with details of how to configure them with VS.
4) I've not seen the speed problems, although I do agree about the overhead on creating a file. Not sure if that's configurable.
For the #1
The solution in TFS 2010 is not the greatest one but it works. You need to modify the registry key on your machine as follows:
HKEY_CURRENT_USER\Software\Microsoft\VisualStudio\10.0\TeamFoundation\SourceControl\Behavior
Change ResolveAsDefaultCheckinAction to False
TFS Power Tools might be a useful extension for you.
http://visualstudiogallery.msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/c255a1e4-04ba-4f68-8f4e-cd473d6b971f
For #2, are you using the "pending changes" window in Visual Studio to keep track of files that are modified? Double clicking on a file there keeps you in the Visual Studio editor.
For #5, make sure Tools->Options->Environment->Documents "Allow Editing of read-only files; warn when attempt to save" is checked.
TFS is hella frustrating. Good luck!
For #2 there is a registry edit you can make so double clicking launches a diff, vote for the answer here - Compare files on double click in Pending Changes view
1, Bash head against wall
2, Say outloud - it's better than SourceSafe
3, Repeat
4, Install git, or mercurial, or just about anything else.
I have a Project on CodePlex which is using TFS and I am using the TFS Plugin for Visual Studio. Now I have copied this project and worked on another PC without TFS and done some refactoring. Foolishly, I have then just used copy/paste and manual text editing to merge my changes, expecting that TFS just picks up the changes.
Apparantly, that is not the case.
Here is a screenshot of my local directory:
My Local TFS http://img259.imageshack.us/img259/2897/tfslocal.jpg
Notice how some files are missing the lock symbol - those are missing. If you look at the current TFS Tree on Codeplex, there are some files which do not exist locally anymore, i.e. WikiPlexExtensions.cs in the main folder.
Is there any way to easily tell TFS to compare my local to the remote repository and pick up the changes? I could re-add the local files using "Exclude from local project" and re-adding them, and I could create the "deleted" files as empty files just to delete them, but if I can avoid the manual messing around that would be good as well :)
The easiest way is to exploit VS 2008's "online" feature. Basically you want to set your solution offline, then bring it online while connected to the proper Codeplex server. TFS should figure out the rest.
Feature overview: http://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/teamsystem/bb898913.aspx
Tweaking the settings by hand: http://blogs.msdn.com/benryan/archive/2008/07/09/using-tfs-2008-power-tools-to-modify-server-s-offline-state.aspx
To compare local and server folders, you can check out TFS Power Tool. After installing it, you can bring up the source control explorer, right click on the server folder and then select 'Compare'. Folder difference window will display the differences. You can also right click on the differences to see available commands such as 'Get Latest' to update your local folder for example. Check out Bryan Harry's blog post on the power tool
I don't think there is an easy fix... What I've done in the past is back up those files that I have edited, then do a "Get Latest Version..." for the files I edited. This should change the files back to being read-only etc... Now, check out the files the regular way and paste the backups you had into the checked out files. Obviously this really only works when there are a couple of files you have edited.
TFS (in Visual Studio) has a "Reconcile" command for this, see Microsoft documentation, or this answer with steps.
BTW: This command may not haven been existing at time of original question, but this question came first when I was searching.
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.