Chapter 3

Team Foundation Version Control

What's In This Chapter?

  • Understanding Team Foundation version control
  • Setting up version control
  • Using the Source Control Explorer
  • Understanding basic version control operations
  • Understanding check-in policies
  • Viewing the history of files and folders
  • Understanding labels
  • Understanding shelvesets
  • Understanding workspaces
  • Getting to know the command-line

If you are a developer you live in a world of source code. When you have more than one person working on a project, versioning becomes an issue. If two developers work on the same assembly, how do you merge their code? How do you prevent accidentally overwriting files? Incredibly, although the practice is rapidly declining, many organizations still just use file shares to store source code. If you are unfamiliar with version control, you can think of it as a filesystem with an extra dimension—time. You are able to share the current state of any file or folder with your team members, but you can go back in time to see what other versions have existed and what the source code looked like at any point in the history of the source code repository.

One of the key reasons you are likely to have chosen Visual Studio Team Foundation Server 2012 is its version control management system. It offers a number of features, including the capability to branch, merge, and shelve your source code, atomic check-ins, policies, security—all the features you expect from an enterprise version control solution. ...

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