TFS Tip – Workspaces and Team Projects

Tip 1: When you create your TFS Team Project, then create it with the following structure

Team Project Name
    |----Main
            |---Source
            |---Documents
            |---Database
            |---Builds

The reason for the above structure is that it will allow you to manage your releases better. See tip 2.

Tip 2: create a separate workspace mapping for the new team project at the Main folder level. This will allow you to easily find all the pending checkins for the main brain of that team project.

Now when you create your first release “Release 1”, you will branch it from Main and it will look like this:

Team Project Name
    |----Main
    |       |---Source
    |       |---Documents
    |       |---Database
    |       |---Builds
    |----Release 1.0
            |---Source
            |---Documents
            |---Database
            |---Builds

At this point create a separate workspace mapping to Release 1. This will allow you to easily find all the checkins related to “Release 1” as opposed to modifications that are part of your main branch. In turn, you will not end up checking in stuff from your main branch by mistake, when you are trying to checkin stuff for your release 1 branch.

Tip 3: If your get-latest begins to take too long then cloak the folders that contain the large items that change infrequently (typically the database and documents folders).

Tip 4: Always use groups to manage your Team Project memberships. Otherwise you will have a lot of administration work later on in the project’s life (when new members come on or old members leave your team).