I'm extremely new to TS and it's not apparent to me. It's seems to me that it must be in there. Could someone please point out how to go about marking a whole solution with a version number or label and then retrieving that specific version back from the repository?
Thx
Applying the label isn't the easiest thing to find. You can get to it by right clicking on the folder containing your solution file in the Source Control Explorer window (which you can get to by double-clicking on the Source Control node in Team Explorer). When you apply the label, apply it to the folder containing the things you want included in the label. Then ensure that the next screen shows you the contents of that folder (i.e. all the files you want to label)
In TFS a label is a bit like a tag. It is actually something that can be edited and you can have files of different versions included in it if you really needed to.
There is also the concept of "Changesets" in TFS. A changeset is a number that always increments on a particular server (or Project Collection in TFS2010). The number represents a unique point in time for that server instance.
To get the files from a particular version, in Solution Explorer right click on your solution and do "Get Specific Version..." In the Version group box you can change the type from the default Latest Version to specifing the Changeset, Date or Label if you want to get a version from an older point in time.
Hope that helps.
Martin.
Related
As in subject:
Go to "Find Changeset" option.
Find a changeset.
Double-click on changeset to open Changeset Details window.
It gives a list of all files that have been checked in within given changeset.
Why I cannot apply a label on those files from that level where I have them all in one place? Especially, that very often they are part of different solutions and projects, so normally I would have to create a label for one file and then search and add one by one to the existing one.
It is so inefficient!
Is it some bug or lack of functionality? If the second - it is hard to believe MS guys forgot about such handy function.
How do you deal guys with such situation?
EDIT - to clarify my reasoning:
If I use jessehouwing's method - yes, it works and it's simple.
But then when I search in the future for that label and want to see what code was included, it gives me a list of all solutions - even those totally unrelated (IWP and PDPRO are the unwanted ones):
If I use it my way - it gives me that:
I think it looks cleaner and gives directly the information of what solutions and files underneath where included at the time when I put stuff into Production environment and applied corresponding PROD label.
The feature you're looking for doesn't exist. generally a single file or group of files at a label doesn't make a lot of sense. While it's possible to "scope" labels in TFVC, it's only possible through the commandline.
generally you'd create a label at the repo or branch level at the specified changeset. That will include all files, including the ones you just checked in. Creatign such label is relatively easy from the source control explorer, though you need to copy the changeset number:
It's unclear to me why you'd only want the changed files to be included in the label, maybe you can elaborate a little more on that requirement.
Update: What you desire isn't possible from inside VS and isn't simple from the commandline either. I suppose that with a bit of Powershell Magic against the TFS Client Object Model you can do this from the commandline and it should also be possible to build this as a Visual Studio Extension (or maybe suggest it to the author of the TFS Source Control Explorer Extensions.
I'm using TFS and VS 2012 and my project is in a broken state and I can't figure out why. I'd like to go back to a previous version of my solution when I know it worked and make changes on that working version. However, when I choose to check out a specific changeset, it seems to me like it's only changing the files that were changed in that changeset. When I use git and check out a revision, my code looks exactly like it did at that revision. Files that didn't yet exist at that revision are removed, files that did exist have contents as they were at that revision, etc. But I can't seem to do the same in TFS. I can't figure out how to get all of the files (and only the files) in the state that they existed when a particular changeset was checked in. Am I missing something? Any help REALLY appreciated.
Try using the Advanced option when you right click on a solution or folder in Source Control:
Then when the dialog appears, check both check boxes so the version you have is overwritten with the specific version you want by selecting Changeset from the ddl and entering the changeset you are after...
This should overwrite the existing solution files with the specific version.
If you have trouble doing it over top of existing files, delete the source on your local machine first and get the specific version after that.
A changeset is just the files checked in at one time, not a snapshot of the whole system. You want to use labels for that. A label will mark all the files in their present state, just as you describe Git doing.
Find the changeset you want and "Get This Version" to only get the changed files.
Manually check out each file for edit in Source Control Explorer to match the changeset.
Now the previous changeset's edits can be checked in.
NOTE: This is MUCH quicker than getting the entire repo using "Get Specific Version."
In order to clean up my project structure, I moved a folder into another (new) folder through the TFS Power Tools Shell-Extension (Rename/Move).
After checking the history at the new place, the move is the only entry. (I tried one folder up, down, even on single files in the moved folder.. same result.)
I had also put on some labels on versions of the folder before the move, since there were some important states of the code I wanted to get back to.
So.. what went wrong, and how can I either get the history or at least find out the label names again and check out those versions?
Turns out it is pretty easy.
In Visual Studio 2010, go to Tools->Options. There you can find the option to show "deleted" items (roughly in the middle of the dialog box). The old folder got deleted during the move - it will be displayed again after activating that option. (They will be kind of grayed with a red cross.)
Labels seem to have disappeared, though, so I had to go by version.
In the Source Explorer you have the normal operations again - like View History or Get.
DISCLAIMER: For reference of everyone that gets here, this answer is not fixing #Andreas problem, just giving some context on why this happens and offering a couple of workarounds.
Seems that losing history when moving folders in TFS 2010 is not a bug, is a "feature". (still happening in TFS2012. From this MSDN link you can read official Microsoft answer:
Thanks for the feedback here. The previous comment about this being by design is correct, and there is an option on the command line. In the UI, history of folders is recursive - always. This is because most of the time, users care about the history of the contents of the folder. Files on the other hand dont have the concept of recursive history - you always see the history for the file itself. Now, from the command line, there is an option to show recursive history (/r) and if you run tf history on a folder without the recursive option, you'll see the changes to the folder itself. This would include changes such as a rename for the folder itself.
Workaround to get history once lost: As you can see there, you have a workaround using tf history.
Workaround to avoid losing history: If you want to avoid losing history in folders instead of using move feature, you can use TFS Integration tool to migrate code from one folder to other preserving history, migrating from $/TFSCode/FolderA to $/TFSCode/FolderB. It is a little bit overkill but if the history is pretty important for you is much better than looking for it in deleted folders
It is true that the folder history is lost, but the individual file history is actually not lost. It is hidden under the little "expand me" arrow at the far left on a file history line. Expand it on the oldest history entry for a file, or anywhere you see it, and you will see history of that individual file also from an old location that no longer exists.
At the top of History window you can edit Source location, put the old name and get the full history before it has been moved.
Also, is good to mention that you can get the full history back by moving/rename the branch back to the old location/name.
A blog states
Labels come with a big warning though - labels themselves are not
version controlled, meaning that there is no way to track or audit the
history of activity on a label. Plus, labels don't keep copies of
versions in case of a file deletion, so if a file gets deleted, any
label that relies on a version of that file is essentially hosed.
This is not the only place I've read similar information regarding TFS labels. The lack of history is clear enough. The second part "labels don't keep copies of versions..." is unclear. In fact, I created a test project > labeled it > deleted a file > performed a Get by Label and the file came back. So what is this referring to? Has the label functionality changed in TFS as of recent?
I realize that a file deletion does not actually remove history, is that the cause? In other words, if I run
tf destroy "$/MyTeamProject/Project/FileName.cs"
Is that what it means to delete a file? If so, that seems an extraordinary circumstance to even consider. I mean, its an intentional unrecoverable deletion of history. Changesets are not going to be any improvement over labels in such a case.
When we apply a label we do so to a version of source control at a point in time. Intuitively, because we initially created a snapshot of source control at a point in time one may assume the snapshot represents source code at a point in time.
This is incorrect. Labels can be edited after creation.
Conceptually, a label defines a product and the product’s bug-fixes (source). A real world example may help. Let’s say we have a product called AlphaBoogerBear. AlphaBoogerBear is a product, not a version (think pre-release Windows names). AlphaBoogerBear can be made into a Label, AlphaBoogerBearLabel. We perform a release of AlphaBoogerBear. There are some bugs. We fix them.
Now, we go back and edit AlphaBoogerBearLabel to include the bugfixes. The label no longer represents a snapshot at a point in time. Instead, it represents the most stable release of AlphaBoogerBear.
Finally, we move to BetaBoogerBear. We have the option to go back and grab a label that represents the old product at its best version in time.
In my opinion, if one requires a snapshot of version of source control it's better to branch. If one requires an edit-able snapshot that represents a product release then a Label is useful. Albeit, it seems a difficult balance of trust and convenience.
As far as the author's intentions, I really can't say for sure. He could mean to say that items can be deleted from a label and thus when you Get by Label the item will be gone. Though, the item is still stored in TFS history so although it is a confusing situation, not all is lost.
I'm not sure what is meant by the sentence about labels getting affected by file deletions. But you have it right, a regular file delete won't affect labels, but a destroy will.
What it's cautioning you about with respect to not being version controlled though, is that somebody can come and edit a label, by including or excluding files from the label, or changing the versions of files included in the label. And there will be no history of these changes to the label definition.
As I understand it, a label in TFS is basically a set/collection of changesets.
Let's say you label a directory with two files in it. The label would then consist of three changesets: one for the directory and one for each file. Deleting one of these files in TFS will produce a new changeset for the directory, so doing a Get by Label at this stage would get the deleted file "back" since it contains the changeset prior to the deletion. Destroying a file would remove it from any changeset records it has appeared in, thus also destroying the information in the label.
Since the label is identified by its name only, it is also very easy to overwrite it with a new label, destroying the old information. The /child parameter to this command can change this behavior somewhat: using /child:merge will keep the changesets that were previously recorded along with the new one, /child:replace will exchange the old changeset with the new. In the example above, none of these alternatives would make any difference, since Get by Label would still retrieve the highest changeset.
We're using Team Foundation Server and we are using Labels to create points in our version history where specific versions (either internal or external) were produced.
Right now we were wondering if a particular changeset was done before or after a specific label (and thus included in that version or not), but we must be looking in the wrong place. This information is usually provided in the bug-tracking system but this time this field was left open so we thought we could use TFS to figure it out.
The version history for a file doesn't include labels applied. To find labels, the place I know to look is to use the "Get Specific Version" dialog, set type to Label and use the Label selection dialog to see which labels we've made, but this dialog doesn't tell me the changeset before/after the label was applied.
Is the only way to figure out if a particular change was part of that release or not to create a new workspace, map up the directory with the files to a temporary directory on disk, use the Get Specific Version dialog to extract that release and do a file-diff?
Please tell me how stupid I am and point me in the right direction.
Run in your local workspace
tf history . /stopafter:1 /noprompt /r /version:Lmylabel
to get
Changeset User Date Comment
--------- ------------- ---------- --------------------------------------------
88888 brian_low 11/11/2012 did some work
Have you tried opening Source Control Explorer, File -> Source Control -> Labels -> Find Label? [EDIT: that may have been in a beta version, and I don't have TFS here atm...]
Also, are you using SideKicks? The Labels SideKick allows you to find a label and see the related changesets.
A label in TFS does not represent a specific point in time - and a label can actually be edited after the event. See the following posts for more information:
Buck Hodges: Finding Changes between two labels in TFS VC
Brian Harry: Why TFS Label are not like VSS Labels.
For this reason, I tend to use Changesets in TFS when recording the point in time for a particular release (in fact we label our binaries and installers with the actual changeset number that they were built from just to make it easier to track). (A changeset does represent a unique point in time for the state of the repository).
Hope this helps,
Martin.
Faced this issue for the first time today. From now on I am including the changeset-number in the label-comment. Not very elegant workaround, but meets my needs.