What's New in Version Control

When you install or upgrade to Visual Studio Team Foundation Server 2012, you and your team can benefit from new features.

Set up your dev machine

• Do you use Visual SourceSafe? You can upgrade your code projects, files, version history, labels, and user information from Visual SourceSafe to Team Foundation Server (TFS) or Team Foundation Service. See Upgrading from Visual SourceSafe.

• Use local workspaces to work on version-controlled files even when you're not connected to your Team Foundation Server. See Decide Between Using a Local or a Server Workspace.

• Configure your workspace so that the date and time stamp of local files on your dev machine match the date and time stamp of the file version in version control. See Create and Work with Workspaces.

Develop your app in a version-controlled codebase

Work in an organized and transparent way

Use My Work in Team Explorer to organize upcoming, ongoing, and suspended work (Visual Studio Premium or Visual Studio Ultimate only). Provide automatic transparency and facilitate collaboration with your team. For example, when you move a work item to In Progress, your team can see on the task board that you have begun the work.

See Develop Your App in a Version-Controlled Codebase, Agile Planning and Iterations.

Conduct code reviews

Conduct multi-party code reviews of active, suspended, or checked-in code (Visual Studio Premium or Visual Studio Ultimate only).

Reviews include overall, file-level, and code block-level comments and comparison of new code with existing code.

See Developer Day: Conduct a Code Review.

Sign up for email alerts

Sign up for project alerts, including email alerts about check-ins, code reviews, and other project events you care about. In Team Explorer, choose Home, Settings, Project Alerts.

Suspend your work and manage your shelvesets

Use Suspend Work to reduce the impact of interruptions

Reduce the frustration and time wasted by interruptions. From the My Work page choose Suspend Work to save your workspace for one task and clean it to start work on a new task (Visual Studio Premium or Visual Studio Ultimate only).

This action saves your work to Team Foundation Server, including changes to code, tests, and other files, and important cues such as open windows, breakpoints, and watch window variables. You can then resume work on a task that you suspended earlier.

See Developer Day: Suspend Work.

Work with Shelvesets in Team Explorer

• Manage and view your shelvesets in Team Explorer.

• Unshelve multiple shelvesets into your workspace, even when you have pending changes to files affected by the shelvesets.

• Find a shelveset using either the “friendly” name or user ID of the team member.

See Suspend Your Work and Manage Your Shelvesets.

Contribute your work to the team's codebase in version control

Use the Pending Changes page in Team Explorer to get a rich persistent view of the work you’ve done and use tools to manage and contribute your pending changes.

Visual Studio automatically detects changes in your local workspace made outside of Visual Studio. For example, if you use Notepad to edit and save a file in your local workspace, the change automatically appears in the Pending Changes page.

See Develop Code and Manage Pending Changes.

Manage and solve problems with files

• Work with changesets in Team Explorer. See Find and View Changesets.

• See differences more clearly and modify the version in your workspace at that time, using the new Diff window. See Compare Files.

• Your work is interrupted less often by conflicts because Visual Studio tries to automatically resolve certain kinds of conflicts. When you must manually resolve a conflict, do so with greater ease using the improved Merge Tool. See Resolve File Conflicts.

• You can roll back changes in Visual Studio. (In the previous version you could roll back changes only from the command prompt.) See Roll Back Changesets.

• “Friendly” names are shown instead of user IDs (for example, in the User column in Source Control Explorer).

• You can use Visual Studio 2012.1 with Team Foundation Server 2012.1 to create and work with longer file paths. For example, you can create a source control path that contains as many as 399 Unicode characters on your Team Foundation Server. See Naming Restrictions in Team Foundation: Restrictions for Version Control.

• Check-in notes are no longer automatically generated by the system. For example, the system does not automatically generate check-in notes when you create a Team Project Collection.

• You can use the new property change type.

• Check-out locks are not enforceable because of local workspaces and in some cases, are not available. See Understand Lock Types.

Isolate risk using branches

• Perform baseless merges from Visual Studio. (In the previous version you could perform baseless merges only from the command prompt.)

Administer version control

• To manage your team project collection and team project version control settings:

  1. In Team Explorer, choose Home, and then choose Settings.

  2. On the Settings page, look under either the Team Project or Team Project Collection section and choose Source Control.

• Manage item security in your web browser.

Note

We are not currently republishing Administering Team Foundation Version Control. We are in the process of revising it for the current version of Visual Studio Team Foundation Server.

Command-Line

• Use the tf property command to manage item properties.

• Some commands have changed. For more information, use the /help option.

Note

We are not currently republishing Team Foundation Version Control Command Reference. We are in the process of revising it for the current version of Visual Studio Team Foundation Server.