We have a Team System environment where our applications are set-up as separate Team Projects. Often, we run into a scenario where a development task requires updates to code in multiple Team Projects.
In this scenario, what are the pros/cons to having a single changeset that contains coding changes across multiple Team Projects? What are the pros/cons to using a one-changeset-per-Team-Project approach?
Providing the changes are made within a single workspace and all the team projects are in the same project collection (this applies to TFS2010) then a single checkin can span multiple team projects.
Within a single server (TFS2005/2008) or team collection (TFS2010) there is a single version control repository with the team projects defining the root folders: all version control operations can span different team projects.
I see no problem with this approach. Remember that TFS will allow you to rollback to the previous changeset, or inspect the files affected by a changeset (comparing to previous versions) so you can rollback some or all of your changes if required.
Related
I suspect we have a common hierarchy with many other business in that we have software products and we enhance each product through a series of projects.
We have TFS2015 which we host ourselves.
Given TFS does not seem to support the idea of Product I created a TFS project called MyProduct. This 'product' exists in both ALM and SCM.
Next I created my first real TFS Project, i.e. I created a TFS project with the same name as the actual project I have to run for my job. I now have two TFS projects,
MyProduct - this is my master TFS project which I treat as my Product
MyFirstProject - this is my first actual project which I'm executing to enhance my existing product
The source code for MyFirstProject is a copy of the source code in MyProduct and should be merged back to MyProduct at some point or points.
When I am at the end of MyFirstProject I want to move the open work items into my Product TFS Project, i.e. MyProduct, including,
Descoped MyFirstProject stories which I want to keep in my product backlog
Bugs which are detected but not fixed in MyFirstProject
Epics/features which are added during MyFirstProject
Next I want to start MySecondProject, etc etc.
Hopefully this is enough detail around how I believe regular products/projects work and my question is, am I using TFS correctly with this approach? It does not seem natural in that my new TFS projects are not an SCM branch they are a new SCM project and moving work items between projects isn't an obliviously easy thing to do.
It feels like I'm missing the point of the TFS project structure.
I'd like to introduce Team Project Collection and Team Projects.
A Team Project Collection is a group of team projects. When you install TFS, a default collection is created to contain all team projects.
A team project is a collection of source code, work items, build
definitions, release definitions, manual tests, etc. You can have
multiple Team Projects per Collection. You create a team project to establish a repository for source code and a place for a group of developers and teams to plan, track progress, and collaborate on building software solutions. Team projects differ from software application projects or solutions. (Please clarify the TFS project you mentioned in post is a team project or oftware application projects.)
According to your description, MyProduct and MyFirstProject should have branch relationship. So you can create a project A under a team project X, then branch project A to meet your requirement.
Work items is under a team project, not a single software application project. In order to achieve what you want, you can create Teams and Areas and assign work items to different Area.
We are using TFS on premise, version 2015 update 3. We are using multiple team projects. Some Team Projects are used for applications (source control and builds), other team projects (with multple teams in it) are used for work item tracking. Teams can work on different applications.
Now we are looking into the Release functionality. Preferably we would like to use 1 team project to keep track of all the releases, so we get an overview of all releases in our organisation. But I can't figure out how to achieve this.
Is there a way to define release definitions linked to builds from an other Team Project? Here Microsoft says: "No additional setup is required when deploying Team Build artifacts published within the same team project." So I guess it should be possible to do an additional setup, but I can't figure out how.
We also have many team projects
We are using TFS 2015 CU2 but I do not think there are to many differences between the two versions.
The artifact link are for team builds within the same team project. I do think there is a way you can link to builds outside to other team projects.
In your one team project you could create all your CI builds there (in the build defintion mappings would can map to any source control path you want you simply have to cut in the path.)
If you still using your XAML build definitions; you could use the TFS Communinity build manager add-in for VS 2013 and clone the build defnition to you new team project.
So there is not easy way currently. We have chosen to release from every team project. The release overview is nice but we chose that it was not worth the effort. Maybe in the next release we will revise.
You shouldn't separate aspects of your project (builds, code, releases, work items, etc) into different team projects. You lose all tracability if you do that, as you're seeing.
You can manage your application portfolio within a single team project with the appropriate use of Teams, but discussion of exactly how to achieve that is going to be very specific to your organization and thus is too broad to discuss on Stack Overflow.
I am new to VS Team Foundation Server 2015 and there I have project for example "WebProjectA". I also have MVC .NET Project called "WebProjectA".
How to manage that project in TFS when I have 3 environments (Development, Testing, Production) ?
Need I have 3 TFS Projects
WebProjectA_Development
WebProjectA_Testing
WebProjectA_Production
Or can I place all WebProjectA solutions to one VS workspace or 3 workspaces and somehow to link it to the TFS and have version system enabled per solution in one TFS project ?
How do you solve this situation ?
I would handle this using a TFS branching structure. Create a single Team Project, called WebProjectA, and a single branch called Testing. Then, branch off for Development, and again for Production. This means that, when you make a change in development, you can merge through to testing, and again into production.
It also gives you the flexibility to switch to feature branching at a later date, and to maintain multiple production branches, should you wish to.
Further reading
I'm the TFS admin at my company. In the past, I have recommended a linear branching strategy for small teams that are also new to TFS. Start in Dev > Dev merge up to Test > Test merge up to Prod.
This works well with solutions whose projects are subdirectories of the solution. What about projects that are dispersed throughout source control?
Can I create a single branch that that can manage projects dispersed in various locations in source control?
E.G.
\$TFS\Dev\Project1
\$TFS\Dev\SomeFolder\Project2
\$TFS\Dev\SomeOtherFolder\Project3
We have a main project that houses all our Assemblies. This project is the "build all" project. It is used with finalBuilder pro to perform the deployment to the next tier. The issue is that these projects are spread out all over source control. I'm not sure how to manage them.
Yes. With Team Build, not only you can build solutions across branches, you can build solutions across different team projects. However, I think the best practice is keeping each project and each branch with their own build definition.
In your case, I'd first try to organize the source tree, then define a master solution that builds all projects. FinalBuilder should support your scenario, though I think FinalBuilder is redundant when you have TFS.
My suggestion is to identify which "projects" are released and versioned independently, and have separate branching structures for each of those.
You don't want to have 2 independent projects (by independent I mean they are released/versioned separately) within the same branching structure.
The typical way to manage dependencies between these projects is to checkin the binaries from Project 1 Version X into the Project 2 "lib" folder. That way you can release new versions of Project 1 at will, but the Project 2 team can decide when and if to take a dependency on the new version.
If your various "projects" are all pieces of the one big thing that is released/versioned together, then I'd recommend just making sure they all live under some root folder (e.g. $\TFS\Dev) and branch from there.
We're starting to user Team Foundation Server and my boss would like some way to "archive" projects. Meaning after they are completed, remove them from an "active" state so that only "active" projects are visible.
Does anyone have any experience with this?
I've thought of 2 options.
1) Create 2 base projects. 1 for active projects and 1 for achived projects
2) Remove all users from the archived projects.
Thanks,
Sam
I would personally recommend waiting for TFS 2010 when more functionality will be introduced that will assist you in the ability to "archive" Team Projects.
In TFS 2010 you will hopefully be able to move a team project to a new Team Project Collection. Actually you do this by duplicating your "active" project collection and then deleting all the team projects from it apart from the one that you want archived. In this active project collection, delete the archived project that you have a copy of in the duplicated project collection. This archived team project will then live in it's own project collection which means it has it's own database etc which can be easily backed up / archived etc.
The archived team project project collection can then be left as it is as it doesn't slow down the server any if not being used - or it could even be detached from the TFS Application instance so that it doesn't show up at all and re-attached at any time.
An advantage of using project collections in TFS 2010 is that full Version Control and Work Item Tracking history will be maintained.
I would use it just as you normally do, but when you are done with the project then you remove it from the visible list. (In Visual Studio you can right click on a project in the team explorer and say remove.)
If you are worried about changes after the project is done, then remove the users from the contributors list. If you really want to boot the users out (so they cannot even see it) then you can deny them rights to the project.
This way you don't have to see it, but you can keep all your projects on the base level.
I would NOT recommend having just 2 base project for active and in-active. A TFS project should not be based on a state.
We created an "Archive" team project and we regularly move unused source code to that team project. It has worked out well for us, the history is preserved so we can always reference the archive project for old code or information on past changes. We also limit access such that developers have read access but only TFS administrators have write access. I haven't checked to see how these moves impact the association of check-ins with work items - mostly because everything we archived was checked in before we moved to TFS.
As for the one active team project, I was led to believe by knowledge experts and online documentation that this wasn't the best way to organize team projects. I think ideally you group projects/solutions together into a single team project if they are related (i.e. by line of business or dependencies).
I'm sure you've already done your research, but there is plenty of documentation out there that might assist (especially if your team maintains a single application or a handful of applications). I would suggest starting with patterns & practices: Team Development with TFS.