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I am not familiar with TFS, however the scenario that I will be coming across is that I will have a branch of source code stored in Visual Studio Team Services (was TFS Online) and locally I will be running TFS 2008.

Would there be any issues pulling the code from Team Services and merging with TFS 2008?

Esther Fan - MSFT
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John Doe
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1 Answers1

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You won't be able to bind the code (solution and projects) to 2 different TFS servers. If you're using the online version of TFS what reason would you have of also trying to store the code in a local repository?

You definitely won't be able to merge the code between the different servers. TFS is a centralized version control system and merge operations need to be handled and tracked by the server.

You could theoretically Manage the code in one of the TFS servers (i.e. have the solution bound to TFS online) and manually manage the code in the other server. However TFS 2008 only supports local workspaces which means that it will make files read only if they are not explicitly checked out. This will cause you no end of pain.

Even if you did it the other way round (made the local TFS server the "master") you will almost certainly create yourself a load of problems as TFS simply isn't designed to be used this way

Also TFS 2008 is pretty ancient and unsupported.

EDIT:

The typical TFS workflow is.

  • Create a development branch on the server.
  • "Get" the code to a local folder on your dev machine (called a workspace).
  • "Check out" the files you need to modify from your branch or "Add" new files as needed.

You should regularly "check in" files to your branch to make sure your changes are saved on the server.

When your changes are complete then "merge" the code from the development branch back to the Main branch.

The code is stored and versioned on the server, but your changes are made on your local machine. To interact with the server you use the Team Explorer plugin in Visual Studio. Modern version of Visual Studio have Team Explorer built in.

If you're using the online version of TFS then you'll want to use Visual Studio 2012 or above.

If you're planning on Forking the code and do not plan on committing your changes back to the server, then you're probably better off using something like Git. You could use Git-tf or Git-TFS to pull changes from TFS and then that would make merging a lot easier and you could use your local Git Repo to manage your own changes

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James Reed
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  • The TFS Online is where the source code will originate, I will have no control over the code on that server. I will be internally working with that branch. (In essence forking out to suit my own needs). However there may be a need to pull the code from the TFS online and merge the changes into my branch from time to time. If I upgraded from TFS 2008 to something more recent would that help? – John Doe Feb 11 '16 at 22:41
  • Nope, it's not designed to work that way. See my edit – James Reed Feb 12 '16 at 00:36
  • Will I need to stand up a SQL server with TFS? – John Doe Feb 12 '16 at 11:54
  • Do you do know where Microsoft states that 2008 TFS is unsupported? If that is the case I can at least make a case to get a newer version installed locally. – John Doe Feb 12 '16 at 12:02
  • Found it. https://support.microsoft.com/en-us/lifecycle/search/default.aspx?alpha=team%20foundation%20server&Filter=FilterNO – John Doe Feb 12 '16 at 12:06
  • If site A is using online TFSVC and site B is using (say TFS 2013), Could we utilize GIT-TFS to merge changes from site A to site B? – John Doe Feb 18 '16 at 15:50