Manage Your Workspaces

Your workspace is a local copy of your team’s codebase. Your workspace enables you to develop and test your code in isolation on your dev machine until you are ready to check in your work.

What do you want to do?

• Get started

  • Set up your Dev Machine and Start Using Version Control You work on a small- to mid-sized team that does not use branches and you want to quickly set up your dev machine.

  • Create and Work with Workspaces You want to create, edit, or remove, and work with your workspaces.

• Decide Between Using a Local or a Server Workspace You’re upgrading your version of Visual Studio and your previous version was earlier than Visual Studio 2012. Should you select Local (recommended in most cases) or Server for the workspace Location?

• Optimize your workspace using explicit, implicit, cloaked, and non-recursive folder mappings You have a large and complex codebase and you want your workspace to contain only the files you need to improve performance, reduce network traffic, and reduce the disk space required on your dev machine.

• Use workspaces to isolate and manage work among different branches You work in multiple branches and you want to set up your dev machine to be able to manage this work.

Next steps

After you get your workspace set up:

• If you don’t yet have one, create a new code project. In Visual Studio, on the menu bar choose File, New, Project.

• Add your existing code to source control. How?

• Download your team’s code into your workspace (if you did not already do so while creating your workspace). How?

• Do you develop your app at a remote site? You might save bandwidth by caching version control files at the remote location. How?