I am developer and work with TFS for a while but never have the responsibility of TFS admin. We have a user that was let go and now his userId has been revoked so we cannot use his id anymore.
He has so many files checked out in TFS and a lot of stuff done, we don't want to lose these checked out files if possible. Is there a way to transfer all his checked out files to me or someone else? Or what is the best way to recover these files?
NOTE: we still have his laptop with all the files, we just cant login to it with his username.
Thank you for your help in advanced
Download TFS Sidekicks (get the right version for your TFS)
They have a Visual Studio Add-in if that is what you are using as your IDE
Backup his files that you want to keep
Use the Workspace Sidekick of TFS Sidekicks to delete his workspace(s)
(this won't delete his files).
This will release any exclusive locks that he has effectively undoing all his checkouts.
You can also use the Status Sidekick to see what files he has checked out.
Get latest source and copy his files over yours
If you are using TFS2012 or later, you can use a 'local' workspace and simply copy his files over. Team Explorer will create your pending changes for you. If you are using a 'server' workspace or a version of TFS prior to 2012, you will need to full check-out everything and THEN copy his files over.
It's not a great solution but it should work for you
The changes to the developer's files that are checked out will be stored locally on the developers machine (specifically in their workspace directories) - transferring "check out status" would seemingly not accomplish what you hope.
You would need to obtain access to the developer's workspace (perhaps via an admin account on the dev's machine), copy out all the contents to a new workspace you own to consolidate differences between "source" and "new workspace".
Once you've copied the developer's workspace to a new workspace you own, you can simply compare "source" to "workspace" to find all the changed files and which are needed vs. not needed. Note, this should be done sooner rather than later as the longer you wait the more differences there will be between the two, making it harder to identify what is actually needed.
Related
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.
I am new to TFS. I checked out a folder from TFS using Visual Studio and then deleted bunch of files/added couple of files within that folder using windows explorer (actually I didn't do it, but that folder has third party libraries and I used an installer which made all these changes).
Now if I go to Visual Studio and try to check in that folder, I am getting this error:
Check in: Operation not performed
Could not find file : /ThirdPartyFolder/aDeletedFile.aspx
I tried to follow the solution proposed in this post, but that didn't work out:
http://www.woodwardweb.com/tfs_top_tip/tfs_top_tip_11.html
When I do 'Get Specific Version' and specified 'change set 1', it doesn't show the deleted files in red as it does in the screenshot of that blog post. Also, when I click OK, it shows the Pending Changes-Conflicts window with all the files that got deleted. Even though I selected "Keep Local Version", when I try to check in, I am getting the same error again.
Is there a way in TFS to take what is in my local version and over write what is in the server with my local version files?
I have done similar operations using Subversion, and this has never been a problem. Hopefully someone will let me know how to achieve this in TFS.
Team Foundation Server requires that you explicitly pend changes for these files - if you delete a file locally, this does not explicitly pend a delete against Team Foundation Server. This is actually a useful feature - the server optimizes the data it sends you based on its knowledge of your local filesystem. That is to say, if you say "get latest", it knows your current versions and will only deliver the changes. If you're working with very large projects, this can be very efficient.
However, when other programs decide to make changes without pending the changes to the server, things can get a bit confused. Fortunately, TFS has the ability to detect changes that were made outside without explicitly pending those changes. You can use the "return online" capabilities of your TFS client.
You'll need the Team Foundation Server Power Tools installed, then you can simply run: tfpt online to detect those changes and select which ones to pend to the server.
(VS2012) Select the missing files from TFS "Check In" list and then right click on them and click on "Undo Changes" to exclude them from the list of "Check In"s forever.
This is one of the major differences between svn and tfs. Svn is somehow more integrated with windows shell and every change in your working folder will affect the server on commit. I propose you to perform any move, delete and rename actions within tfs UI, not from shell.
I started work a lone developer last year and I found VSS is no longer a good option for source control so I decided to use TFS 2010 instead.
I have had to learn everything from a book - of which there are few.
I am currently creating a new build and in my workspaces I see a have 4. I want to delete one of them and rename another.
However I do not know what the consequences of doing this are. If I delete a workspace, will that remove the associated files under source control? How do I check which files these are? What happens if I change a status from active to cloaked?
As you can see, I am a beginner in all this.
Workspaces are only a mapping from SourceSontrol folders onto your local file system. Also workspace contains information about versions of the files you have locally, so when you hit 'Get Latest Version' only recent changes are sent from server to you, not the whole files. Information on what files are checked out is stored in workspace too, so if you have pending changes in the workspace and delete it then there'll be a bit of a challenge to check these changes in. Renaming of the workspace will not break anything as far as I know.
Article An introduction to TFS Workspaces may be interesting to you.
Like the others have said, the workspace only says what local files you have checked out, and the status, etc. Workspaces are pretty granulal (i.e. per user and per machine) so you could have mutliple workspaces with the same username in the same project. E.g. if you have a copy of Visual Studio at work and one at home, you could have different files checked out and you wouldn't run into any conflicts like you would have in VSS or something based on VSS Like like VSSConnect.
We've had a couple of people leave out project and have had to go in and remove their workspaces after the fact. This hasn't been a big deal in terms of any code losses but if you don't have access to the machine anymore you will have to use the TFS tools.
Try TFS Sidekicks, it provides a nice GUI to manage all the nitty-gritty back-end stuff in TFS
I have been using SourceGear vault for some personal projects and Team Foundation Server for work projects. One thing TFS is missing is a simple feature that Vault has on its check in dialog window.
In the Vault client, you can see if the checked out file changed from the previous version checked in. Here is a screen shot. Notice the column "Details"? That tells you there is a difference. The way this is super helpful is if you have to check out a entire project because you are going to do code re-generation. I'll check out my class library project and then regenerate my CodeSmith templates. Doing this may result in just a few specific files from changing. When I view the pending check-in screen, I see the files that really changed and I can compare to see the impact.
SO... can TFS do this? Maybe there is a 3rd-party tool that will do it for me? Is there a TFS SDK or PowerTool that I have to get. Anyone want to build it?
Select all the files in "Pending changes" window and activate the context menu. Then click "Undo..." > "Undo Changes" > "No to All".
The files without changes will be rolled back.
Per this page, you can run this command from the Visual Studio Command Prompt.
tfpt uu /noget /r *
You'll need to have TFS Power Tools installed for this to work. Also, make sure you browse to the root of your mapped folder within the command prompt (ie - C:\TFS for example).
TFS Power Tools links (if you don't already have it)
TFS Power Tools for 2010
TFS Power Tools for 2012
There is no need to undo the unchanged files, as TFS will notice they're unchanged upon checkin and will only associate the truly changed files. Any files checked out but unchanged are reverted to their last known checked in version and will not be associated with your checkin. It is impossible in TFS (though not very clearly documented) to check in an unchanged file. It will always revert to the previous version if there are no changes.
You can quickly undo your unchanged files by calling 'tfpt.exe uu /r' from the command line (you need to have the Team Foundation Power tools for this) or by using the "Undo unchanged" button in the Pending changes window. This removed any items from the list that are unchanged immediately. So that you can see exactly what you're checking in.
Though it might be that this option is added by the Team Foundation Power Tools or the TFS Source Control Explorer Extensions (which are a must have for every TFS user anyways).
See also:
https://stackoverflow.com/a/2100981/736079
https://stackoverflow.com/a/6387656/736079
https://jessehouwing.net/vsts-tfs-why-i-like-them/
I don't like answering my own questions, but it looks like there might not be a real Microsoft solution out there. For me, this is how I handle the problem at the office using Visual Studio.
Before I re-generate the business objects, I make a copy of the entire folder structure
I check out the entire project or the root generated folder
I start the code generator. Sometimes, I know exactly what is changing, but other times, I might make a lot of changes and I don't want to miss anything. My code generator at work also generates all the SQL files needed to DROP / CREATE stored procedures.
Using SourceGear DiffMerge, I compare the folders of the just generated and the previously backed up folder.
This is pretty time consuming. I never thought of it as a problem until I saw Vault identifying that a file was different on disk from the repository.
Maybe you all can say how you do code generation / regeneration when working with a source control repository.
I work in a corporate development environment where many developers may be working on the same file, and we have TFS as our source control as well. In our document of Best Practices for TFS, we really discourage checking out files that the developers don't intend on changing, that way we naturally exclude files without differences when submitting a changeset.
To answer your question, I normally just look at the "Pending Changes" window and run a Compare on the "changed" files that I'm unsure of--the Compare tool should immediately tell you if your local copy is the same as the server copy. Unfortunately, there's no real workaround other than what I suggested, but I don't see the scenario where I absolutely must check out an entire project branch for editing.
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.