Chapter 3Using Centralized Team Foundation Version Control

What's in this chapter?

  • Understanding Team Foundation version control
  • Setting up version control
  • Using 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 tool
  • Understanding branching terminology and concepts
  • Getting to know common branching strategies

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 item, 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 file system with an extra dimension—time. You can share the current state of any file or folder with your team members, and 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 2013 is its version control management system. It offers a number of features, including the capability to branch, merge, and shelve your source code, and atomic ...

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