Wednesday, January 24, 2007 8:31 PM
by
plitwin
Team Foundation Power Toys: There's a Reason They are Called Toys
So I desperately needed to rollback the deletion of six source code files, which, by the way, were asp.net custom control classes. See previous post. The simple solution, right click on the files and select Rollback, Revert, or some other command. Okay, so maybe the command is nested somewhere below that point in the command hierarchy. Or NOT! Microsoft actually decided to ship Team System without any rollback feature. Can you believe it? Makes one think that Team System is a joke.
Power Toys Don't Cut if For Me
So I read about the unsupported Team Foundation Power Toys, which I dutifully download. And, guess what when I enter the tfpt /rollback command, I get the wonderfully usefull error "Unable to determine the workspace." So I read through the power toys docs and they make little sense, stepped a bit too thick in their own terminology. But I don't want to become an expert in learning to use the power toys--I just want my source code back! Am I crazy, or isn't recovery one of the major reasons we all use source code control systems? Anyway, I could never get the power toys to work for me. Oh well.
The Happy Ending
I did manage to hack up with a workaround: I could open the files by viewing the history from the TFS Source Control Explorer (double-click on the Source Control node under your project name in Team Explorer). From there I could view each of the six files in Notepad (right click on the folder, select View History; the History window pops up; select the changeset that you wish to view and double-click on it; now double-click on the source file from the Details for Changeset window) and then I in turn added each of the six files back to the project, copying the text from the history into the new files. Of course, this is made worse by the fact that the Details in Changeset window is a modal dialog, but it did work one painful file at a time!
My question is this: why is Microsoft worrying about releases of Expressions and AJAX when they have some serious problems with their enterprise-class team-based development tool. And they wonder why some critics don't take them seriously...