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I'm switching to a new machine and would like to keep my TF files as they are. Thus I simply copied the entire folder to the new machine's (same as the previous one - C:\TF), mapped it to the TF server's root, and attempted to open a solution from the file explorer, hoping that it would bind more or less automatically.
I then ran into issues similar to others that have been described elsewhere, such as here and here. VS/TF insist that the binding on the solution and all projects is "invalid".
Unbinding and re-binding does not work, the binding reappears but remains invalid.
Recreating the workspace does not work.
There is nothing funny about the solution file's content.
The relative paths are correct - if I remove the bindings and try to add the files to source control, it overwrites the already existing files in the source control explorer (the item previously appearing as a grayed-out "Not Downloaded" becomes white with an "add" pending change).
Tried mapping the workspace to a "fake" network drive that pointed to the new machine's hard drive (just in case TF was mixing up the identical paths), still the same.
Deleting Team Foundation's AppData settings doesn't work.
When I perform a get on the solution folder, though, the binding becomes healthy all of a sudden. In the end I performed the get, deleted all the new files and put the ones from the old machine in their place. VS/TF apparently had no issues with the binding then. It's a rather inconvenient way of achieving that end, though.
I'm forced to conclude that TF doesn't want me to bind my own, local files to source control without first performing a get in that workspace, even if the file paths match what is on the server. Question: why is that? Am I doing something conceptually wrong? Doing it the wrong way? Is this behavior an idiot-proof feature of the tool, or just a limitation?
You're doing it wrong :/. | it's a feature, not a bug.
The workspace is registered on the VSTS/TFS server as well as in the local workspace cache. After moving the folders over to a new machine (and to the same folder location), you need to tell VSTS/TFS the new computer name these files now reside on.
You have to run tf vc workspaces /updateComputerName:oldComputerName workspacename to update the workspace registration on the server.
But I'm afraid you need to do this before overwriting the workspace with a new mapping.
Now I think the only option is to use the Unbind option, save all, then open the source control menu again and rebind all the projects in the solution. Or edit the solution files manually (there's a tool for it as well).
I have a situation where a developer made mass changes to a project outside of TFS (long story), and now we want to put those changes back into TFS (files added, removed, renamed).
Of course, TFS is not like Git; if I check out the project, then delete the files from the workspace and copy over the new files, TFS won't adapt to those changes.
I have discovered that I can do a Compare from File - Source Control, and that the Compare screen allows me to mark files as added/deleted. This helps, but is a slow process for a large project, and quite prone to human error.
So, my question is: Is there an automated way to get TFS to simply add all new files and remove all deleted ones?
I don't care about tracking history of renamed files--they can be
considered "removes" and "adds."
I have tried unbinding and rebinding the workspace; this did not work for me (or I didn't do it correctly).
I am using VS 2015, TFS 2015, and I have the TFS Power Tools.
If you are using a Local Workspace then you should be able to get latest on the workspace, then copy over all the new files in Windows Explorer which will generate pending changes and file adds.
If you go into Pending Changes in Team Explorer you will have lots of detected changes for new files etc. but you can promote them to included changes.
This isn't going to deal with file renames or deletions though so it might not be the best solution.
Alternatively you could use Reconcile Changes in Version Control
In Source Control Explorer, right-click a folder, and then click Compare.
In the Compare dialog box. select the folder versions to compare.
In the Folder Difference window, right-click the folder or file you want to reconcile, and click Reconcile.
This will allow you to choose what to add or change to version control
You might try using tfpt online. I would add the /adds /deletes /diff /recursive flags as well.
I think in almost any case you will have some conflicts/manual work to do here.
There is a blog post on a possibly similar situation that used tfpt online as well: Discover File Changes Made Outside of Visual Studio
Since I did not get to try the above suggestions, I'll post the workaround I did, in case it helps anybody else. Hopefully, the above suggestions are better than what I ended up doing.
Make sure nothing is checked out
Open solution
Team - Go Offline
Close solution
Windows Explorer - Copy latest source folder into the current source folder (Windows Explorer will do a Merge).
VS - Open solutin, select solution file
File - Source Control - Advanced - Change Source Control
if you get a message about unloaded projects, make sure all projects loaded. Click "Reload" on those that didn't.
Shift to select all project, click Bind
Do a Compare in Source Control Explorer. Manually add all new files. Manually delete all deleted files. Frown.
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 have several projects in TFS which visually appear in the directory hierarchy as grayed out. When I browse within the projects in Visual Studio 2010/Source Control/TFS 2010, I notice that all of their contents have a Latest value of "Not downloaded". Normally, I have only seen Latest values of "Yes" or "No".
I have tried all of the varieties of "Get latest" that I know, but I am always alerted that "All files are up to date".
If I try to "Check out for edit", I am not allowed.
When I observe the properties of these grayed out files, they always say Workspace Version = "Not applicable".
How do I fix TFS so that I can download and check out the projects again? My suspicion is that my workspace is messed up, but I do not know what to do to restore/reconfigure it.
I was able to remap the directory to fix my issue. To do this, I
selected (right-clicked) the branch that included all of my code, and selected "Remove Mapping..."
renamed the folder I was mapped to within TFS (you can delete it as well, but I renamed just to keep it during this experimental process)
created a new folder with the original name of the branch I was mapped to in the beginning, and
selected (right-clicked) the branch that included all of my code, and selected "Map to Local Folder".
This process forces a complete re-download of the entire branch. Luckily for me, my branch was only 2GB, so I was able to re-download in about 5-10 minutes.
The reason for getting "All files are up to date" - is that the information on the TFS server and the files on your disk is out of sync. If you delete the files on your disk with file explorer - the TFS server still thinks you have the file on disk. To re-sync you have to force an update like this:
Check the two checkbox on this dialog - and click Get:
It happened to me as well when I added and existing project as a reference to another project.
When I added the project reference I had a pop-up message that told me that the current project already exists at the source control but at a different location then the relative path of the current project.
by a mistake I choose the wrong option which lead to the unnecessary mapping.
In order to solve this issue I've removed the mapping from the workspace.
only after removing the mapping i could get the latest project.
I solved it by following this - remove the work space and then tfs prompted me to download everything again.
https://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/library/ms181386(v=vs.100).aspx
It sounds like the folders / files in TFS are not mapped to a local drive in your workspace.
In Source Control Explorer, select the "Workspace:" dropdown, then select "Workspaces".
Choose your current workspace form the list that appears, then hit "Edit". Check that the TFS folder $/blah is mapped to a local folder c:\tfs\blah
You should now be able to get latest, check out etc.
I had some weirdness with this after :
updating to TFS2017
updating to VS2017
trying to change my TFS URL to https (gave up and reverted back to http)
So somewhere along the line this broke my workspace such that all my projects were showing as unbound. I was able to do a get latest again. This should not overwrite any files you have changed providing they are writable, but if you have any doubt whatsoever then backup your local workspace before doing get latest. It will ask you to resolve conflicts - so make sure to select 'keep local copy'.
In my case, when the branch was deleted: Right click + Check in, helped.
Why Why WHY doesn't TFS's get latest work consistently?
You would have thought that feature would have been tested thoroughly.
What I have to do is, get specific version, then check both overwrite writetable files + overwrite all files.
Is my local setup messed up or you do this also?
TFS redefined what "Get Latest" does. In TFS terms, Get Latest means get the latest version of the files, but ignore the ones that the server thinks is already in your workspace. Which to me and just about everyone else on the planet is wrong.
See this link: http://blogs.microsoft.co.il/blogs/srlteam/archive/2009/04/13/how-get-latest-version-really-works.aspx
The only way to get it to do what you want is to Get Specific Version, then check both of the "Overwrite ..." boxes.
Sometimes Get specific version even checking both checkboxes won't get you the latest file. You've probably made a change to a file, and want to undo those changes by re-getting the latest version. Well... that's what Undo pending changes is for and not the purpose of Get specific version.
If in doubt:
undo pending check in on the file(s)
do a compare afterwards to make sure your file matches the expected version
run a recursive 'compare' on your whole project afterwards to see what else is different
keep an eye on pending changes window and sometimes you may need to check 'take server version' to resolve an incompatible pending change
And this one's my favorite that I just discovered :
keep an eye out in the the Output window for messages such as this :
Warning - Unable to refresh R:\TFS-PROJECTS\www.example.com\ExampleMVC\Example MVC\Example MVC.csproj because you have a pending edit.
This critical message appears in the output window. No other notifications!
Nothing in pending changes and no other dialog message telling you that the file you just requested explicitly was not retrieved! And yes - you resolve this by just running Undo pending changes and getting the file.
TFS, like some other source control providers, such as Perforce, do this, as the system knows what the last version you successfully got was, so get latest turns into "get changes since x". If you play by its rules and actually check things out before editing them, you don't confuse matters, and "get latest" really does as it says.
As you've seen, you can force it to reassess everything, which has a much greater bandwidth usage, but behaves closer to how SourceSafe used to.
It's hard to respond to a statement without examples of how it's not working, but it's crucial to understand that TFVC (in "Server Workspace" mode, which was the mechanism prior to TFS 2012) does not examine the state of your local filesystem. TFVC Server Workspaces are a "checkout-edit-checkin" type of system where this is by-design, an intentional decision made to massively reduce the amount of file I/O required to determine the state of your workspace. Instead, the workspace information is saved on the server.
This allows TFVC Server Workspaces to scale to very large codebases very efficiently. If you are in a multi-gigabyte code base (like Visual Studio or the Windows source tree) then your client does not need to scan your local filesystem, looking for files that may have changed, because the contract you have with TFS is that you will explicitly check a file out when you want to edit it.
You are expected to not mark a file as write-only and change it without explicitly checking it out first. If you go down this route, then the server does not know that you have made changes to your file, and performing a "Get Latest" operation will not update your local workspace, because you haven't told the server that you've made changes.
If you do subvert this mechanism then you can use the tfpt reconcile command to examine your local workspace for changes that you have made locally.
If you find yourself using "Get Specific Version" and selecting the "force" and "overwrite" options, then it is very likely that you are in the habit of bypassing all of the enforcements that TFS has implemented to keep you from hurting yourself, and you should probably consider TFVC Local Workspaces.
TFVC Local Workspaces provide an "edit-merge-commit" type of version control system, which means that you do not need to explicitly check files out before editing them and they are not read-only on-disk. Instead, you simply need to edit the file, and your client will scan the filesystem, notice the change, and present this as a pending change.
TFVC Local Workspaces are recommended for small projects that do not require fine-grained permissions control, since they present a much nicer workflow. You are not required to be online, and you do not have to explicitly check files out before editing them.
TFVC Local Workspaces are the default in TFS 2012, and if they are not enabled for you, then you should ask your server administrator. (Organizations with very large codebases or strict auditing requirements may disable TFVC Local Workspaces.)
Eric Sink's excellent book Version Control By Example outlines the differences between checkout-edit-checkin and edit-merge-commit systems and when one is more appropriate than the other.
The Professional Team Foundation Server 2013 book also provides excellent information about the differences between TFVC Server Workspaces and TFVC Local Workspaces. The MSDN documentation and blogs also provide detailed information:
Decide between using a local or a server workspace
Server workspaces vs. local workspaces
Team Foundation Server – Trying to understand Server versus Local Workspaces
Team Foundation Server (TFS) keeps track of its local copy in a hidden directory called $TF.When you issue the "get Latest Version", TFS looks into this folder and see weather I have the latest copy or not. If it does it will not download the latest copy. It does not matter if you have the original file or not. In fact you might have deleted the entire folder (as in my case) and TFS won't fetch the latest copy because it does not look into the actual file but the hidden directory where it records changes. The flaw with this design is, anything done outside the system will not be recorded in TFS. For example, you may go into Windows explorer, delete a folder or file and TFS wont recognize it. It will be totally blind. At least I would expect there Windows would not let you delete this file but it does!
One way to enforce the latest copy is to delete the hidden $TF folder manually. To do that, go to command prompt and navigate to the root folder where you project was checked out and issue this command
rd/s $tf // remove $TF folder and everything inside it
If you want to just check the hidden folder, you can do it using
dir /ah // display hidden files and folders
Note: If you do it, the tf will think you do not have any local copy even though you have it in files and it will sync up everything again.
Caution: Use this method at your own risk. Please do not use it on critical work.
"Get latest version" by default will only download the files that have changed on the server since the last time you ran "Get latest version". TFS keeps track of the files you download so it doesn't spend time downloading the same version of the files again. If you are modifying the files outside of Visual Studio, this can cause the consistency problems it sounds like you are seeing.
Unfortunately, there has to be one or more bugs in TFS 2008, since this problem regularly crop up on developer machines and build servers where I work as well.
I can do Get Latest, I can see in the history list of the project that there have been commits after I last did a Get Latest, I have not touched the files on disk in any way, but after the "Get Latest" function has completed, when I check the TFS tab, some of the files still says that they're not the latest version.
Obviously TFS is able to determine that I have old files locally, since the list says so. Yet, Get Latest fails to do that, get the latest version. If I do what you did, use the Get Specific version, and check the two checkboxes at the bottom of the dialog, then the files are retrieved.
We changed our build servers to always use the Get Specific version type of function instead, so this part now works, but since our build server (TeamCity) also relies on checking if there have been changes to the files in order to kick off a build, sometimes it lapses into a "nothing changed, nothing to see here, move along" mode and does nothing until we forcibly run the build configuration.
Note that I have experienced this problem on a machine that is never touched, except for get latest + build, both manually, so there's nothing tampering with the files. It's just TFS getting confused.
One time this cropped up I verified that the files on disk was indeed binary identical to the version previously retrieved, so no manual tampering had been done with the files.
Also, I fail to see how TFS can "know" whether files have changed on disk or not without actually looking at the contents. If one part of TFS can see that the files are indeed not the latest version, then the Get Latest version should absolutely be able to get the latest version. This in reference to comments to other answers here.
It might because you are login TFS as the same user, and the workspace name (based on machine name by default) is also the same, so TFS thinks your are on the same machine and same workspace, thus you already have the latest version of the files, so it wont get them for you.
try rename your machine, and create a new workspace as a new machine.
Go with right click: Advanced > Get Specific Version. Select "Letest Version" and now, important, mark two checks:
The checks are:
Overwrite writeable files that are not checked
Overwrite all files even if the local version matches the specified version
WHen I run into this problem with it not getting latest and version mismatches I first do a "Get Specific Version" set it to changeset and put in 1. This will then remove all the files from your local workspace (for that project, folder, file, etc) and it will also have TFS update so that it knows you now have NO VERSION DOWNLOADED. You can then do a "Get Latest" and viola, you will actually have the latest
I had the same issue with Visual Studio 2012. No matter what I did, it didn't get the code from TFS source control.
In my case, the cause was mappings a folder + subfolder from the source control separately but to the same tree in my local HD.
The solution was removing the subfolder mapping using the "manage workspaces" window.
Most of the issues I've seen with developers complaining that Get Latest doesn't do what they expect stem from the fact that they're performing a Get Latest from Solution Explorer rather than from Source Control Explorer. Solution Explorer only gets the files that are part of the solution and ignores anything that may be required by files within the solution, and therefore part of source control, whereas Source Control explorer compares your local workspace against the repository on the server to determine which files are needed.
It could happen when you use TFS from two different machines with the same account, if so you should compare to see changed files and check out them then get latest then undo pending changes to remove checkout
This worked for me:
1. Exit Visual Studio
2. Open a command window and navigate to the folder: "%localappdata%\Local\Microsoft\Team Foundation\"
3. Navigate to the sub folders for every version and delete the sub folder "cache" and its contents
4. Restart Visual Studio and connect to TFS.
5. Test the Get Latest Version.
In my case, Get specific version, even checking both check boxes and undoing all pending changes didn't work.
Checked the work spaces. Edit current workspace. Check all paths.
The solution path was incorrect and was pointing to a deleted folder.
Fixed the path and get latest worked fine.
Every time this happens to me (so far) is because I have local edits pending on the .csproj project file. That file seems to keep a list of all the files included in the project. Any new files added by somebody else are "not downloaded" because they are not in my locally edited (now stale) project file. To get all the files I first have to undo pending changes to the .csproj file first then "get all". I do not have to undo other changes I have made, but I may have to go back and include my new files again (and then the next guy gets the same problem when he tries to "get all"...)
It seems to me there is some fundamental kludginess when multiple people are adding new files at the same time.
(this is in .Net Framework projects, maybe the other frameworks like Core behave differently)
just want to add TFS MSBuild does not support special characters on folders i.e. "#"
i had experienced in the past where one of our project folders named as External#Project1
we created a TFS Build definition to run a custom msbuild file then the workspace folder is not getting any contents at the External#Project1 folder during workspace get latest. It seems that tfs get is failing but does not show any error.
after some trial and error and renaming the folder to _Project1. voila we got files on the the folder (_Project1).
Tool:
TFS Power Tools
Source:
http://dennymichael.net/2013/03/19/tfs-scorch/
Command:
tfpt scorch /recursive /deletes C:\LocationOfWorkspaceOrFolder
This will bring up a dialog box that will ask you to Delete or Download a list of files. Select or Unselect the files accordingly and press ok. Appearance in Grid (CheckBox, FileName, FileAction, FilePath)
Cause:
TFS will only compare against items in the workspace. If alterations were made outside of the workspace TFS will be unaware of them.
Hopefully someone finds this useful. I found this post after deleting a handful of folders in varying locations. Not remembering which folders I deleted excluded the usual Force Get/Replace option I would have used.
I encountered the same problem:
My development server was corrupted and restored, but the information restored was from a few days ago.
TFS was updated that all the files are up to date, but in practice my files were correct a few days ago!
Nothing I did helped. get latest did not get the latest version.
At the end I got specific varision from a month ago. my files were updated accordingly, and then I did get latest.
And it worked. the files have been updated.