I have two files that I would like to compare, however they are each in a different TFS collection. How can I do the comparision within TFS ?
The comparison is never performed within TFS. All that TFS does is fetch the two files, then call a comparison utility.
You can do that by hand. Get the files, then go compare them.
TFS Integration Platform, that facilitate integration between external systems and Team Foundation Server.
You cam integrate file or different TFS systems
http://tfsintegration.codeplex.com/
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We have 2 TFS servers, one is inside the firewall, and the other one is outside the firewall. Because of security reasons, we still need to keep it this way. But the question is: is there a way to Sync these 2 TFS servers, say at every night?
Say we have servers TFS1 and TFS2, right now, we only want to Sync from TFS1 to TFS2, not bidirectional synchronization. If possible, we want to have complete synchronization.
I searched some time, but I could not find a good solution. It seems all recommendations are for old version TFS.
Are there any solutions for the latest TFS? existing products? Or, some information about API that we can use to make a tool for this?
Thanks
There is nothing changed with sync two TFS servers for the latest TFS version. Just as Daniel and many other expert suggested:
TFS generally lives in 1 instance and 1 only. TFS is a production
environment for the development team. It doesn't make sense to have
two TFS systems and have them synchronize to make this separation.
Having your teams work on two different TFS environments at the same
time is a very strange requirement.
Source Link
The best solution in your case, negotiating with your IT team, set up a safe and stable way to allow your top Management users to connect the internal TFS. You could also set up SSL for your TFS server to improve the safety.
It will also save you a lot of time costs for maintaining two servers syncing.
If you insist on syncing two TFS servers take a look at this similar question: Sychronising work between two TFS servers
Another way is using VSTS instead of your external TFS. Microsoft has documentation on this exact scenario which can be found here: Migrate to Visual Studio Team Services : Move from Team Foundation Server (TFS) to Visual Studio Team Services (VSTS) and bring your data along.
This link also contains the download link for the migration tooling which you will want to use
Currently the following versions of TFS are supported for import:
TFS 2017 Update 3
TFS 2018
TFS 2018 Update 1
Have an in house TFS server that employees use (using TFVC) and third-party contractors that are using VisualStudio Team Services (aka Visual Studio Online or VSO) (also using TFVC). Need to keep the two synced; projects in VSO get merges from check-ins from TFS and TFS get merges from VSO. The TFS instance has many dozen projects and the VSO instance has two or three of those in TFS.
Any suggestions appreciated.
While there are a few tools that can "sync" between different TFVC instances, it's very hard to keep the flow going and you often run into merge conflicts and other problems. The TFS Integration tools were an official solution from Microsoft, but those have been deprecated.
Given that you're on TFS 2017 and VSTS, I'd highly recommend switching to Git repositories. Git was made to handle scenarios like these, to have multiple hosts that need to share the history and from which you need to be able to sync sources across.
Both TFS 2017 and VSTS can host the repository for you and it's relatively easy to setup CI builds that sync the sources between branches on both instances to trigger pull requests.
We have a situation where at a point in our project's life, we needed to split off work item tracking and source control into 2 separate TFS projects, with the work items being in a VS Team Services project, and the source on-prem in TFS 2013.
The reason at the time being, we needed to grant access for our stakeholders to the product backlog, without them being on the corporate network where TFS is hosted. At the time there was concerns about security of the source code, hence the whole project was not lifted and shifted, just the backlog.
Now we're realizing some of the security concerns were not warranted, and we are missing out on the integration of ALM provided by a single project having both responsibilities, and would like to merge our source control out into the cloud-based VSTS project.
The problem is, the migration tools are overwriting the Work Items in VSTS. Is there some way we could merge, preserving that data, or any alternative to merge these two things together somehow?
I think you're looking at the Team Foundation Server Integration Tools here if you want to migrate source code history. Bear in mind that it's not going to be perfect (data time stamps will not be the same etc.).
If you can get away with it then just stick the latest code in VSTS and consider the on-prem server your archive should you need to go back. That doesn't tend to be too popular so you'll be wrestling with the integration tools. It's not the most friendly thing to use but mostly it will get the job done.
When you configure your session, you will want to choose Team Foundation Server\VersionControl.xml for your configuration. Then select a One-way-migration between your on-prem and VSTS.
You'll need to install VS 2012 or at least the Team Explorer.
Edit Coincidentally I had to do this myself so I blogged about the process here
Is there a way to "sparsely checkout" a local workspace in TFS 2012? We currently use SVN and are investigating TFS 2012. Specifically, I don't want my entire collection to be downloaded to a developer machine. We branch to provide isolation among teams and products. I'm hoping that we can selectively choose which items in the branch are downloaded locally.
You can map various parts of your source tree using different workspaces to achieve some of the effect that you're looking for. We use this to separate components in our build system. Workspaces are configured by client machine/by user.
Is it possible to add your projects/source to two different TFS servers?
If possible it would be very handy to synchronize my local TFS server with TFSPreview.
This is definitely not supported. TFS stores cache of your local workspaces and will never allow you to map the same folder to two different servers. This is how you can work with tf.exe without specifying server switch every time.
Very simple solution for you is to mirror one workspace with robocopy in another directory. Before you start doing something on your own please look at http://tfsintegration.codeplex.com/. TFS product team is afaik using it exactly for purpose of synchronizing between 2 servers.