I have a set of work items that are completed and I am ready to move their changes to our production branch. Is it possible to find the changesets that are attached to them and selectively merge them with the target branch?
Not easily is the short answer.
Currently there is no real link between work items and code promotion. You can associate a changeset with a work item on check-in (or indeed at any time), but that is about as far as things go.
Basically you would have to do this by hand using the provided UI in Visual Studio (i.e. look up the work items, get the changeset ID's and then do (possibly several) merges by selecting the appropriate changeset ranges. If this is a regular way of working then you could write a program in .NET that used the Microsoft TFS API to talk to the work item tracking component to get the changesets required and then either did the merges programatically or kicked off the command line client (tf) to bring up appropriate UI for the merges.
Sorry it's not a more helpful answer. I know that the team at Microsoft have heard this scenario a few times now however I've not heard of any plans to have it better supported "out the box" in the current or the next release of TFS. That said, there are a lot of improvements to the branching ad merging stuff in TFS2010 so it is possible that something is/will be in there that might help you. It may be worth you logging some feedback on http://connect.microsoft.com/VisualStudio for this feature if it is important to you.
Good luck,
Martin.
Related
I made sweeping changes to 2 projects (call it Project A and B) in my team's repository in this PR *. After getting through testing, review, and getting comments resolved, I found out that a different team is working on conflicting changes to project A on a different PR and those changes need to go to staging first. Now I can't merge my PR because it has changes to A, but my changes to Project B need to be merged ASAP. Now the obvious answer is probably to abandon the PR, do a soft reset and start again with two branches, but my team wants to keep the comment threads on both A and B because they showcase a month of work and important design decisions made by multiple teams during the reviewing process. Is there a way to split my changes to Projects A and B into two separate PR's without losing all the comments?
My current solution is branch a new branch off the current one, manually undo my changes to Project A from the branch, push, and leave the comments to A dangling (I think there will be some comment view that the file reference is deleted), merge. Then create a new PR of the newest branch, copy and paste each of the 50+ dangling comments over to their respective files, resolve all, and merge. This is obviously not great because I lose some context and it will take hours. Other solutions I've seen on here will delete all existing comments altogether and I can't have that.
*Yes, I definitely shouldn't have done that.
There is no out of the box solution for this.
I would suggest to use Azure DevOps APIs, and even that isn’t a walk in the park.
Modus operandi
Choose your language, PowerShell, js, c#, etc and start exploring. Below a suggestion where to start:
Start with getting the original PR using the getbyid api
Since you mention the comments are the most import part, the next thing is to retrieving list with thread comments API.
Optional: Per comment iterate through the thread with the next get api, because the docs state: Represents a comment which is one of potentially many in a comment thread.
From this point, retrieve more info you need or start building the copy of the PR with, create PR and adding comments and other part you need to reuse.
Again, this is not easy and maybe retrieving and saving this in another format already helps you.
I did tried to find a solution for you online, but did find it (yet). Found other handy stuff like this quick and dirty js script to search through comments.
I recently started taking an interest in using a branching model similar to Vincent Driessens Git branching model. We have multiple developers working on the same project so using different branches for different features is a big plus for us. The model states that after a feature is developed, it is merged back into the Development branch, and on a certain time a release branch will be created from it.
Now my problem is that I don't know who added what to the dev branch since the last release, but I do want to present a list of changes that will be implemented for the next one. So the question is, how do I know what features have been added to the dev branch?
We're using TFS for version control. As far as I know I have the following options:
Better labeling and commenting of versions (currently there is no labeling and little commenting)
Linking TFS tasks to versions (not sure how to create a nice list of that yet though)
Maybe I should just follow my own options above but I was curious about how you guys deal with this.
First I would suggest you take a look at the TFS Branching and Merging Guide as it will likely answer most of your questions.
how do I know what features have been added to the dev branch?
I think the "develop" branch in Driessen's model is most closely equated to the "main" branch in the TFS guidance. I would suggest that you shouldn't merge changes into main unless they are already planned to go into the next release. Then when you are ready to release you simply branch from the latest version of main.
Keeping track of what features are intended for the next release is something that would be handled by the work item tracking system.
Separately, you may find the Track Work Item feature of Team Explorer to be helpful.
Eric suggests that you read your team's diffs every morning. Can I get TFS to automate this in some way? Ideally I'd like an email with all of the differences in, but I'd settle for a link to each of the commits.
As someone who works for Eric and who has the behaviour of checking the diffs each morning let me explain what I do. I'd like to think that I was one of the people he was thinking about when he wrote the post, but I know for a fact that he didn't know I did the diff checking each morning :-)
In Eclipse I use the Team, Synchronize... functionality to compare my local workspace with the latest on the server. As I do a get latest frequently, this tells me what has happened since I last did this (i.e. what changed while I wasn't looking).
In Visual Studio, I can do a similar thing by right clicking on the root folder of the area that interests me and selecting Compare... and then doing a compare of the Workspace version with the latest version.
Alternatively, you can just do a "History..." on the folder that is of interest and a brief scan down the history view will show you what has been happening and you can go look at what is interesting. It also encourages you to leave good check-in comments, and to encourage your developers to do the same :-)
I used to have email alerts configured for each check-in (Team, Project Alerts...), but I just ended up ignoring them most of the time. I even have a robotic rabbit configured to talk to me when someone does a check-in or runs a build - but this is only useful during the day, not checking what has happened the previous day while I was asleep (I live in a different time-zone to the rest of my colleagues so they do a lot of work while I sleep and vice-versa, making the practise of diff-checking even more useful)
In theory it would be possible to write a program that did generate you a diff each day between the latest version and your workspace version, however I've never bothered myself. This is partly because as I find the most value of the practise comes in exploring the changes that were made each day rather than just reading about them. I also admit that I wasn't aware that anyone else in the world was doing this daily diff routine - I figured I was alone in my code voyerisum, but obviously not!
UPDATE Feb 12, 2009: The following blog post just came to my attention.
http://blogs.msdn.com/abhinaba/archive/2008/07/07/auto-generating-code-review-email-for-tfs.aspx
It talks about (and provides source for) a tool called CRMail that will generate an email from a shelveset that will contain links back to Team System Web Access to show the diffs for each change in the changeset. It would be possible to modify this source to get it to show you diffs between changesets if you wanted to. Then you would just need to hook it up to run either as a nightly scheduled task or on every check-in by subscribing to the check-in event from TFS.
Have you explored setting up a report on the project portal that would show diffs based on date? I haven't done this (and I'm at home now so I can't investigate it), but I know that there is a lot of information you can get out of the portal. Whether you can get code diffs, I don't know.
The other alternative would be automating something with tfsadmin or the power tools. Again, not at work so I can't look at it, though the power tools seem like they may make it possible to do what you want from the docs.
A quick solution would be to configure project alerts to send you one email per changeset.
Filter these into a separate folder in your email client, and review them at your leisure.
I have a client who is using one TFS project just for source control only and now wants to manage work items in a totally different TFS project, using a different process template, and intends to link changesets to work items across TFS projects.
I know that this is possible in TFS, but don't know what the limitations or issues that come with this configuration. e.g Build Summaries, Reporting, etc.
I would prefer branching the code into a new TFS project and managing code and work items together in one project, but need to know how the above method stacks up.
It'll work - I've occasionally had to associate checkins with work items from other projects. I haven't noticed any issues with reports or the like, that said this seems like an overly complex arrangement with little benefit.
Seems like a strange set-up to me. While it will work, TFS is designed for the check-ins and work items to be in the same team project so you won't really get the full benefit of the TFS features. Does the client know that they can modify the process template of the existing team project or do what you say and branch or even just move the source into a new team project.
We used this model to allow us to have separate projects but against the same source branch. It worked for a while but once we started being more adventurous with branches the model broke down. So as others have noted, there's no reason why technically you can't do this, it's not standard.
I've tried using source control for a couple projects but still don't really understand it. For these projects, we've used TortoiseSVN and have only had one line of revisions. (No trunk, branch, or any of that.) If there is a recommended way to set up source control systems, what are they? What are the reasons and benifits for setting it up that way? What is the underlying differences between the workings of a centralized and distributed source control system?
Think of source control as a giant "Undo" button for your source code. Every time you check in, you're adding a point to which you can roll back. Even if you don't use branching/merging, this feature alone can be very valuable.
Additionally, by having one 'authoritative' version of the source control, it becomes much easier to back up.
Centralized vs. distributed... the difference is really that in distributed, there isn't necessarily one 'authoritative' version of the source control, although in practice people usually still do have the master tree.
The big advantage to distributed source control is two-fold:
When you use distributed source control, you have the whole source tree on your local machine. You can commit, create branches, and work pretty much as though you were all alone, and then when you're ready to push up your changes, you can promote them from your machine to the master copy. If you're working "offline" a lot, this can be a huge benefit.
You don't have to ask anybody's permission to become a distributor of the source control. If person A is running the project, but person B and C want to make changes, and share those changes with each other, it becomes much easier with distributed source control.
I recommend checking out the following from Eric Sink:
http://www.ericsink.com/scm/source_control.html
Having some sort of revision control system in place is probably the most important tool a programmer has for reviewing code changes and understanding who did what to whom. Even for single person projects, it is invaluable to be able to diff current code against previous known working version to understand what might have gone wrong due to a change.
Here are two articles that are very helpful for understanding the basics. Beyond being informative, Sink's company sells a great source control product called Vault that is free for single users (I am not affiliated in any way with that company).
http://www.ericsink.com/scm/source_control.html
http://betterexplained.com/articles/a-visual-guide-to-version-control/
Vault info at www.vault.com.
Even if you don't branch, you may find it useful to use tags to mark releases.
Imagine that you rolled out a new version of your software yesterday and have started making major changes for the next version. A user calls you to report a serious bug in yesterday's release. You can't just fix it and copy over the changes from your development trunk because the changes you've just made the whole thing unstable.
If you had tagged the release, you could check out a working copy of it and use it to fix the bug.
Then, you might choose to create a branch at the tag and check the bug fix into it. That way, you can fix more bugs on that release while you continue to upgrade the trunk. You can also merge those fixes into the trunk so that they'll be present in the next release.
The common standard for setting up Subversion is to have three folders under the root of your repository: trunk, branches and tags. The trunk folder holds your current "main" line of development. For many shops and situations, this is all they ever use... just a single working repository of code.
The tags folder takes it one step further and allows you to "checkpoint" your code at certain points in time. For example, when you release a new build or sometimes even when you simply make a new build, you "tag" a copy into this folder. This just allows you to know exactly what your code looked like at that point in time.
The branches folder holds different kinds of branches that you might need in special situations. Sometimes a branch is a place to work on experimental feature or features that might take a long time to get stable (therefore you don't want to introduce them into your main line just yet). Other times, a branch might represent the "production" copy of your code which can be edited and deployed independently from your main line of code which contains changes intended for a future release.
Anyway, this is just one aspect of how to set up your system, but I think giving some thought to this structure is important.