TFS 2012 is installed on a Server. On this server there are 3 projects- Dev, QA, and Prod. Is there a way to locate where a source code file is on the server. So be able to tell if it is in the Dev, QA, or Prod project currently. And would this be by Source Code name or by using a label and searching for that label?
I would say that division you have made as projects isn't the intended way of using TFS, they're meant to be made as branches within the same project. You may have specific reasons to have them created as projects (and I'm interested in why), but you won't get much help from standard TFS source there, I'm afraid.
You can use Find in Source Control on wildcards or the equivalent tf command
tf info [wildcard] /recursive
to look for source control paths, but there are two caveats:
this search is limited to per-project, so you will have to do the search for each of your projects in turn (until you get a hit).
By default the command returns all source-controlled objects, even deleted ones, so you'll have to filter the search on DeletionID and Local path
This command could be scripted to search through each project folder. And here's a related Q&A for doing it programmatically.
Related
We currently use TFS 2010 for controlling some of our .NET projects.
I'd like to know whether it's possible to provide some kind of versioning within TFS for a specific folder on a network share for example.
The idea being is to control release packages (zips) for every release we do. As this bit is done by some other person (not technical and he doesn't use Visual Studio or any tech tool), it'd be great to streamline the process of versioning the zip files for every release.
Technically speaking:
We've setup this folder \servername\releasezips and every time I drop a file named release.zip, it would automatically commit (push) this file to the TFS server (no comments needed) and furthermore, once the file contents change (meaning that someone dropped another version of the file in there), the system would again push the file to TFS, but with a following version.
Is this possible somehow? I've seen somewhere that I could programatically have some extra control over TFS, using REST API.
Thanks in advance!
Thanks for your tips, Daniel and PatrickLu-MSFT.
As I said, I did want something straighforward, some kind of control similar to what box.com provides, where you associate a local folder on your machine with the cloud. So, once you drop files in the local folder, the small box client synchronizes it along with the cloud. If access the box.com, I can see the different versions of that specific file.
So what I did was, I've created a small .NET app to monitor the folder and any new files dropped in there would get checked in to our TFS server, by using the tf command line (of course ignoring work items or comments).
So, progamatically within the .NET app, it builds up the tf required commands for processing and versioning the recently dropped files and therefore, executes them.
By the way, I could have used the Team Foundation API in order to do the same job, but it would demand way more effort.
Cheers
According to your description, you want to commit/check in files during the build/release pipeline.
It's not a recommend way to check-in generated build files and modify source code during a build pipeline. If you really want to do this, you could edit the build workspace files and use tf commands in custom activity and call the powershell eq:
cd $env:BUILD_SOURCESDIRECTORY
$TFFile = Get-Item "C:\Program Files (x86)\Microsoft Visual Studio 1x.0\Common7\IDE\TF.exe"
$tfOutput = [string]( & $TFFile.FullName checkin /noprompt /override:"***NO_CI*** New version is $newVersion." /comment:"***NO_CI*** New version is $newVersion." 2>&1)
Another way is installing TFS Power Tool and use the Windows PowerShell Cmdlets to check in the files. Refer to this link for more details: PowerShell and TFS: The Basics and Beyond
For version the dropped files, you could take a look this similar question: TFS Build Copy to Versioned Folder
Basically, you have to customize build definition with custom activity and based on build.buildnumber variable to generate/create .zip file.
We're using Team Foundation Service instead of a local TFS.
Our solution was created on Visual Studio 2012.
My problem is now that we want all assemblies to have the same version number (this part is already solved by using a CommonAssemblyInfo.cs that is linked into all projects).
The issue I'm facing right now is that we need the tfs changeset number at the last digit of the assembly version (e.g. 1.0.0.4711 where 4711 is the changeset number).
I've found several examples, but none of them worked for me.
And yes, I especially searched here on stackoverflow a lot.
I also have to admit that I've never looked into the MSBuild scripts...
Can anyone please give me a hint on how to accomplish this?
Is it for example possible to use the MSBuild Extension Pack on Team Foundation Service (not local TFS) and if, how to do that?
As always, time is my worst enemy...
Note that from 2010 Tfs employs Windows workflow for building the package the workflow calls msbuild for compiling the projects only - while its possible to pass changeset this way to msbuild its rather more hops.
Following deals with your problem, however the linked solution is more complex that needed:
Can assembly version been automatically updated with each TFS 2010 Build?
This is one of best series of tutorials on the custom build activities, the author is on stack as well i believe, one specificly about versioning
http://www.ewaldhofman.nl/post/2010/05/13/Customize-Team-Build-2010-e28093-Part-5-Increase-AssemblyVersion.aspx
In short you need a custom activity to run before compilation on source files, find all CommonAssemblyInfo.cs files, feed this list to your custom activity, it modifies the values inside with passed value of full version number or only the changeset and optionaly check in the change (probably not since your changeset will be out of sync then).
You can also take a look at https://tfsbuildextensions.codeplex.com/ set of activities there is TfsVersion activity among them, at the very least it will provide examples.
Functionality need for this should be available through Team Explorer and source control - The Custom activity assemblies and build templates usually are located in folder in your team project root - the location of this folder is defined for build controller you can change this through team explorer build section.
Changeset is available from value BuildDetail.SourceGetVersion, not sure if this was fixed/changed in 2012 however there were 2 issues about this value in 2010
Its doesnt respect GetVersion override in default build template - you will manualy need to update if override is used
When running latest build (no override) it will get the last changeset number from tfs - depending on your branches this may not be the same as 'last' changeset for the branch of build. You will either have to live with this, provide overrides for each build or implement activity that checks branch history for last changeset value and overrides it again.
It should be noted that GetVersion should be able to accept any sourcespec version - changeset, date, label etc. I havent played around with this enough to provide more details to you.
Colin Dembovsky wrote a great overview of doing version embedding using the new pre-build script setting in TFS 2013 build definitions.
The Changeset number is easily accessible within the pre-build process in the environment variable TF_BUILD_SOURCEGETVERSION. I was able to use this to embed the Changeset value in our binaries using a script based on Dembovsky's work above. (I used Perl, not powershell, so you probably don't want to see it ;-)
This approach doesn't require any changes to the build workflow which makes it a big win for me.
I've used Wintellect's solution - MSBuild-only, no TFS magic needed. I also added to the auto-generated CSharp file:
[assembly:AssemblyInformationalVersion("$(BuildNumber)")]
So I get the TFS build number.
I'm trying to write a very lightweight "build" script which will basically just get a few files from TF (based on a Changeset number). Then I'll run those files in SQLCMD.
I'm using this:
tf.exe get c:\tfs\ /version:c2681 /force /recursive
However, this appears to get EVERYTHING, not just the files in changeset #2681. I'd like to be able to point it to the root of my tfs workspace, give it a changeset number, and have it just update those few specific files. Also, it appears to be getting older versions (perhaps what was current when changeset #2681 was checked in)?
Is there a way to get just those specific files, WITHOUT needing to call them out specifically in the tf get itemspec?
EDIT: I actually had to add the /force option in order for it to do anything at all. Without force, it doesn't appear to even retrieve from the server a file I deleted locally, that's definitely in the changeset.
thanks,
Sylvia
Everything mentioned in Jason's and Richard's posts above is correct but I would like to add one thing that may help you. The TFS team ships a set of useful tools separate from VS known as the "Team Foundation Power Tools". One of the Power Tools is an additional command line utility known as tfpt.exe. tfpt.exe contains a "getcs" command which is equivalent to "get changeset" which seems to be exactly what you are looking for.
If you have VS 2010, then you can download the tools here. If you have an older version, a bing :) search should help you find the correct version of the tools. If you want to read more about the getcs command, check out Buck Hodges's post here.
The TFS server keeps track of what each workspace contains1. Any changes made locally with non-TFS client commands (whether tf.exe, Team Explorer or another client) will lead to differences between the TFS Server's view and what actually exist.
The force options on the various clients just gets everything removing such inconsistencies (effectively resetting both what is on the client and what the server thinks is there).
When you perform a get against a specified version (whether date, changeset or label) you get everything up to and including that point in time, whether on not specifically changed at that point. So getting
tf get /version:D2012-03-30
will get changes made on or before that date.
To get only the items included in a changeset you'll have to do some work yourself, using a command to get a listing of the content of a changeset and parse that to perform the right actions (a changeset can include more than just updates and adds of files2).
It seems to me that if you want to perform a build at each changeset affecting a particular TFS folder you would be better off looking at using TFS Build which is all about doing exactly that – avoid reinventing the wheel – and focus on the build part (other continuous build solutions are available).
1 This will change with TFS11 local workspaces.
2 Eg. handing the rename of a folder will take some non-trivial work.
The command will get all the sources for the given changeset. By default it will only get the files that it thinks are different between your workspace and the server. However, by using the /force option you are asking it to get everything regardless of the state it thinks your workspace is in (which is much slower but has the benefit of ensuring your workspace is fully in sync with the server).
So just removing /force will probably achieve what you want.
edit
As I said above, tfs will get all files that it thinks are different from the server. If you manually delete a file from your local workspace, TFS won't know that it is missing from your local version, so it won't think it needs to update the file. There are three solutions to this:
Use /force to make sure things are in sync, and put up with it being very slow.
Don't modify files in your workspace with anything other than TFS tools (tf.exe, Visual Studio, TFS power tool for the explorer shell). You shouldn't just delete files on your local hard drive - if they really need to be deleted, then delete them in source control.
Go offline in TFS before you make changes manually. Then when you go online, TFS will search for all the changes you have made and add them to your pending changes so that TFS is aware of them.
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 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.