I started using TFS Team explorer 2012 and happen to notice a new process called promoting. As I understand it, the Team Explorer detect any changes made to the files outside of the TFS explorer and count them for promotion? Am I right?
How do I take care of the situation where I made a change to the file which is already checked out through TFS, then made a change via Windows Explorer\Notepad but dont want to include the changes made through the Windows Explorer\Notepad.
This is a new feature of TFS 2012 called Local Workspaces.
You are correct in that changes made outside of visual studio can be included in the check-in by promoting them, if they are not already under source control.
If they are already in source control and you do not want to commit them, then you would need to right click the file and choose Exclude. This will move the file from Included Changes into Excluded Changes.
If you do not like the new Local Workspaces you can tell TFS to go back to the old model of Server Workspaces:
Open Team Explorer
Go to Settings
Under Team Project Collection select Source Control
Click the Workspace Settings Tab
Here you can choose the workspace type.
While everything that discens said is correct, one thing bears explicit mention: there is no change to the level of granularity of Team Foundation Server. You still check out files and edit files and check-in files.
In your example, if you have a file checked out and you edit it in Notepad, the changes will be checked in. There is no change here from previous behaviors. There is no way to keep these changes from being checked in, short of saving the file with a different file name.
Related
I've added a folder with asp.net core project which isn't supported by Visual Studio 2015 (which is used for everything else) and thus not included to the general solution.
To have those files in source control I had to manually add them using "add items to folder" command in source explorer. So they are checked-in but tfs not tracking changes for them anymore although there are differences that are shown if compare to the latest folder on the server:
How do I make TFS track them and show pending changes for edited files?
According to your description, looks like these files are all out side of Visual Studio.
Not sure if you are using server workspace or local workspace.
When adding or editing the workspace you click Advanced >> . There is a setting of Location: Local/Server.
For local workspace, when your script or anything else changes files outside Visual Studio, your workspace detects the changes automatically.
It also detects adds or deletes but you have to include them to your Pending Changes manually with the link under Excluded Changes.
For server workspace, you could choose to use Reconcile command. See https://stackoverflow.com/a/22860674/932282 for a complete answer.
Besides, you could also take a look at other solutions in below similar question:
How to have TFS 2010 detect changes done to files outside of Visual Studio?
Force TFS to detect changes
I think you just added them to source explorer and not to the solution, as you said. In this case, there is no editor application (even your VS) that is responsible for doing the check-out operation because they are not aware of TFS. On the other side, TFS can detect that changes have happened to the files but can not track them.
If you do not activate the "Get the latest version before check-out" option in your team project, then you can go to the source control and check-out those files manually and then check-in them manually again when your work with them is done.
Please before doing this, take a backup of your source code for caution.
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.
When I check in changes in TFS Express 2013 using Visual Studio 2013 Professional, there is a list of "Excluded Changes" that has 1541 items in it.
I have never told TFS to exclude a change, and do not understand why anyone would even want to "exclude" a change (isn't source control all about SAVING changes???). I am a bit worried that I have changes that are not being saved...but am even unsure if this is even what it means. I have Googled for more information about "Excluded Changes" in TFS, but haven't found any explanation.
Can anyone explain to me: What are Excluded Changes? Why would I want to exclude a change? And why are there 1541 excluded changes that I never requested to be excluded? Should I be worried that changes are being excluded? Should I change these excluded changes to INCLUDED changes?
There are a number of things that can cause a "change" to be excluded:
Team Explorer will, by default, ignore files in obj/* and bin/* and a few other folders. As well as certain extensions like .csproj.user.
They're not loaded in your current solution, so Team Explorer assumes they're made as part of either a different solution and that you don't want to check them in together with the changes that do match the context you're in.
They're made in a different workspace, again Team explorer assumes you want to check in groups of files that logically make sense.
They're manually excluded from the current checkin. You may do that when you want to first check in one file that fixed Bug 123, then check in another set of files that fixed Bug 124.
Files created outside of Visual Studio are never automatically added, so when you zip up a set of .cs files and that zip ends up in your workspace folder, Team Explorer will detect it, but won't add it automatically.
There is a final issue that may be going on here, if for some reason a project hasn't been added to source control, or the bindings in the solution file were not checked in correctly, then any file added to that project will be ignored as well, as Visual Studio assumes that project should not be under sourcecontrol.
Using "Add existing project" doesn't automatically put that project under the same source control bindings as the solution. which would cause team explorer to assume 6.
The path may previously have been "cloaked" or "unmapped", mapping a folder after the fact doesn't tell Team Explorer to add them.
You may have been working offline and were using a server workspace. When you tell Team Explorer to come back online, you need to ensure that all adds are correctly done. A Local workspace doesn't have this issue, as it can locally track the changes without having to talk to the server.
You may have chosen "Check in pending changes" from a subfolder in the Solution Explorer (or on an individual item or project) or in the Source Control Explorer. When you do that, Team Explorer scopes the Pending Changes window to only the items that match that context. All other changes are temporarily moved to the "Excluded Changes" section.
You should inspect the Excluded Changes list and either ignore them using your .tfignore file. You can do this from the UI as well by right-clicking such an excluded change and choosing the option to ignore by path/extension or pattern.
Basically, if you see stuff in the Excluded Files section, either right-click/include them or add them to your .tfignore file.
That way it's at least very clear that items in that list have not been evaluated yet and most probably need to be included.
You may also want to check your source control bindings by opening File/Source Control/Advanced/Change Source Control Bindings... to ensure that all projects show as bound to sourcecontrol and don't show any errors.
Some additional context
In Git as well as in other source control systems, changes are often not automatically pended. This is to prevent you from accidentally checking in stuff that you did not intend to. In Git you need to explicitly call git add to mark a change as one that you intend to commit. Until you do that the change is considered "untracked", which is essentially the "Excluded Changes" feature of TFVC.
Subversion (SVN) has a similar behavior where changed files are marked as unversioned and need to be added explicitly through calling svn add.
So this isn't very strange behavior for a source control system. It essentially puts you in control of your sources.
Wanted to give another case where files are excluded. If you add a project from template or a new item to your project that includes a default name like "MainWindow" then rename or delete that file before ever commiting changes. "MainWindow" will be in the excluded changes and the item with new name will be in Included changes. In this case you can safely delete them.
I am using Visual Studio 2013. Regarding TFS workflow, there are issues I have when working on a bug or work item, after I am finished, I move the changes into a shelfset for further review, undo my changes by right clicking on the pending changes and clicking undo. The move on to the next issue or enhancement. The shelfsets can be indpendendly reviewed and then applied to whatever branch they are currently needed.
The problem I have is that undoing through visual studio does not completely reset the solution to a completely clean state. There are often orphaned files around or projects that have references to non-existing files or other such problems. I'd like to be able to completely nuke and reset my solutions from source control as if I am a new developer and I have not found an easy solution to do this.
Currently, the only way I can accomplish this is to go to "Source Control Explorer" remove the file system mapping for the project. Go to the file system, removed the folder. Go back into "Source Control Explorer" add the mappings back in. And then "Get Latest Version".
Is there an easy way to completely reset a solution in Visual Studio with TFS?
You can achieve this in Visual Studio 2010 without Power Tools. Process is likely similar for other VS versions.
Open the Source Control Explorer. Right-click the entry you want to reset, then choose "Get Specific Version." Select the version you want to reset to. Ensure that the two checkboxes are checked:
☑ Overwrite writeable files that are not checked out
☑ Overwrite all files even if the local version matches the specified version
This will overwrite all locally mapped files with the server's version. (And will correspondingly take time proportionate to the number of files.) I do not believe that this operation will remove any unmapped files.
If you have the Power Tools installed, call tfpt scorch /deletes /recursive /diff. That should make your local folder match the server exactly.
You can also call tfpt treeclean, which will just delete any item that is not mapped to TFS. It won't update or replace any changed files though, like scorch will.
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.