Paul Litwin's Blog : Team System

Team Foundation Power Toys: There's a Reason They are Called Toys

plitwin — Thu, 25 Jan 2007 04:31:00 GMT

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...

Brain Dead Decision: No Roll Back in Team Foundation Server Source Control

plitwin — Wed, 24 Jan 2007 19:08:00 GMT

I can't believe it. How stupid is Microsoft? I swear. They ship a supposed rock-solid server-based source control system and don't provide a rollback feature? I didn't discover this until today when I inadvertantly deleted some source files. So I'm rooting around for an hour trying to figure out how to restore the files from history but to no avail.

Finally I decide to do a Google search and lo and behold, according to a post from Barry Gelvin, Microsoft decided to ship TFS without support for rollback.That makes the product very marginal in worth. What were they thinking? When was the last time my neighbors in Redmond checked into the real world. <disgusted>

Alas, there is some unsupported download called the Team Foundation Power Toys that provides a back door to this functionality. I will download this puppy and see if it works as claimed.

How incredibly lame!

Paul

Team System Source Code: Unlocking Checed Out Files

plitwin — Sat, 30 Sep 2006 23:52:00 GMT

We had a problem recently where one of out developers (a summer intern) left with some files checked out of the Team System Source Control system. Turns out there is no way through Visual Studio 2005 to un-checkout a file. However, there is a command line tool tf you can use to accomplish this and a number of other things. I found a couple of useful URLs that explain how to use the tf utility:

These two posts were quite useful.

Paul