patterns & practices: Visual Studio 2005 Team System Guidance

Source Control Questions and Answers

Index

Accessing Version Control

• What is the MSSCCI Provider and when is it used?
• What other IDEs support Team Foundation Server?
• When should I use the Team Foundation Server Power Tool?
• What are the most common version control extensibility scenarios?
• How do I work with version control from the command line?

Administration

• How do I grant permissions on a file within a folder that has inherited permissions?
• What should I do, if a developer has left the project?
• How do I manage interns or other developers that I do not trust to perform check-ins?
• How should I modify permissions after my application has shipped?

Branch/Label/Merge

• When should I use labels?
• How do TFS labels differ from VSS labels?
• What is branching?
• When should I consider branching?
• What are the reasons not to branch?
• How do I use branching to release my application?
• How do I use branching to maintain my application?
• How do I use branching to reduce conflicts between teams?
• How do I use branching to reduce conflicts between features?
• What are the proven practices for branching and merging?
• What is the difference between branching and labeling?
• What is the "path space" branching model?
• How does the TFS promotion model work?
• How do I merge two branches?
• Can I merge across team projects?
• What is a baseless merge?
• What is the code promotion model?
• What is the difference between the logical and physical view of branches?
• If I use the code promotion model, how often should I merge?

Checkin and Checkin Policies

• What is a change-set?
• What is a check-in policy?
• When and how can I override check-in policy?
• How do I enforce a policy?
• How do I use a check-in verification system?
• If I modify file names or delete files on the disk does version control get out of sync?
• How does automatic conflict resolution work?
• How do I resolve conflicts manually?
• How do I avoid conflicts?

Checkout, Get, and Lock

• How do I find out who was the last developer to modify a file?
• How does the get command work?
• What is the difference between shared and exclusive checkout?
• When should I use the lock command?
• What lock types does TFS support?

Distributed/Remote Development

• How do I work off-line?
• How do I optimize for distributed team development?
• What is the TFS Version Control proxy?
• How do I optimize TFS Version Control proxy performance?

Migration

• How is TFS Version Control different than VSS?
• How is the checkout model different from VSS?
• How should I migrate my source from VSS to TFS?
• How should I migrate my source from other version control systems?

Project/Workspace Management

• How should I organize my team projects?
• How should I manage dependencies between projects?
• What's a workspace?
• How do I use workspaces to isolate a developer?
• What are the proven practices for workspace mapping?
• When should I create a new Team Project versus a new Branch?
• How should I manage source code that is shared across multiple projects?
• How should I manage binaries that are shared across multiple projects?
• How should I organize my source tree?

Shelving

• What is shelving?
• What is a shelveset?
• When would I typically use shelving?
• How do I use shelving to back up my work?
• Why would I want to unshelve a shelveset?