Author: Alfred Myers

As part of implementing branching for the project I’m currently working on, I had to do some restructuring of the source control folder structure.

The structure was generally well organized except for the fact they didn’t take branching into consideration when setting up the folder structure:

$

• Project
  • AnalysisServices
  • Assemblies
  • DatabaseObjects
  • IntegrationScripts
  • Models
  • OldLabBranch
  • TeamBuildTypes
  • Etc.

I wanted to create a branch in where AnalysisServices, Assemblies, DatabaseObjects and IntegrationScripts could be isolated in conjunction so new feature development could be done in parallel with regular maintenance without one breaking the other.

Using the branching guidelines I’ve talked a couple of posts ago, I managed to structure the folders as below:

$

• Project
  • OldLabBranch
  • Main
    • Sources
      • AnalysisServices
      • Assemblies
      • DatabaseObjects
      • IntegrationScripts
    • TeamBuildTypes
  • Models
  • Etc.

The problem with this setting is that your Team Build Types won’t show up in Team Explorer 2005 because it has a dependency of TeamBuildTypes being a direct child of your Team Project’s folder. Moving back TeamBuildType to $/Project did the trick and everything worked fine.

$

• Project
  • OldLabBranch
  • Main
    • Sources
      • AnalysisServices
      • Assemblies
      • DatabaseObjects
      • IntegrationScripts
  • Models
  • TeamBuildTypes
  • Etc.

When we upgrade to TFS 2008, I’ll move back TeamBuildTypes to the place recommended by the guidelines as they really do make sense.

There are times when loading a solution in Visual Studio 2005 you get a “Some of the properties associated with the solution could not be read” but the solution is nonetheless loaded.

There’s a KB about it, but the problem we had here had nothing to do to what’s being described on the article.

The problem lays on the fact that for some reason, the TFS source control section of the solution file got duplicated and there were multiple instances of it:

To fix the problem:

1. Unbind the solution from source control
2. Open the .sln with Notepad and make sure you delete all of the “GlobalSection(TeamFoundationVersionControl) = preSolution” sections from the file.
3. Bind the solution to source control again.

With that, Visual Studio will recreate the section properly and you should stop receiving the message.

This week I’m taking a look into branching and merging strategies in TFS.

VSTS Rangers and MVPs have released guidance for both TFS 2005 and 2008.

Even if you’re using 2005, if you want to dig into a little more details, you should take a look into the 2005 version of the guidance.

Microsoft Team Foundation Server Branching Guidance – Home (for TFS 2005)

TFS Branching Guide 2.0 – Home (for TFS 2008)

And by the way, yesterday I ordered Juan-Luc’s Professional Team Foundation Server from Amazon. It should arrive in two or three weeks.

Recently I’ve been doing some stuff with TFS so I added TFS Radio to the set of podcasts I hear regularly.

http://www.radiotfs.com/