Last month I posted on Mario Rodriguez's blog post in which he was requesting community feedback regarding TFS Version Control Check-In policies. As a result of the feedback which was received, the TFS Version Control team is going to be releasing a Control Check-In Policy Pack.

In his latest post the current goals of the pack of policies are described:

Check-in policy granularity: there is one already in Code Gallery and what we will do is package this, change some of the UI and take out some of the complexity

Work-Item Associations: This is a very cool one that I hope many of you will find useful. You get to specify a query and if the associated work items by the developer are not part of the query results the check-in is blocked. This is very useful when it comes to making sure that check-ins are always associated with approved bugs.

Banned files: this policy allows you to specify a file extension or a regular expression in order to keep files that you don’t want out of version control. This is usually used for dll’s, build artifacts, or some website files that are automatically generated.

Check-in Comments: this policy gets shipped as part of the SDK. It looks at the check-in comments and makes sure it is not blank.

Chris Birmele has written a nice paper on Branching and Merging as it relates to Team Foundation Server. Check it out here.

Mattias Lindberg recently posted on the advantages of VSS over Team Foundation Version Control. The main idea which Mattias was trying to get across was the fact that TFS Version Control is simply not a viable solution for developers who are running a small operation (1 to 2 developers). In order to get TFS up and running, there are several costs and requirements which make VSS a more viable, affordable option (although it may not actually be a better source control system). The hardware, software/OS costs to install TFS can be tremendous so I completely understand where the author is coming from.

Personally, I view TFS as a software process solution which integrates Version Control into the engineering process. Therefore, personal projects which may not require all of the additional TFS features (process guidance, Office Integration, TFS Build, Work Items, etc.) may benefit more from the lightweight VSS alternative. Afterall, there is a large amount of ramp-up time required just to start to get familier with all of the features (and small issues) with TFS.

There was a recent TFS Version Control Blog post which asked the community for feedback regarding TFS Version Control Check-In policies. The feedback questions were as follows:

1. Would you like us to release a check-in policy pack together with some best practices and ship that out of band?
2. If we do decide to do this then the next question becomes which policies are customers writing themselves that we can standardize and put in the pack?
3. Which policies would customers like to see as examples?

Please visit reply to the post so that we can hopefully convince the TFS Version Control team to release a some standard check-in policies.

The TFS Version Control Blog is ran by Mario Rodriguez who is a program manager on TFS Version Control. Keep that in mind when you post your feedback comments. I know that I would personally love to see a standard check-in policy pack which would handle the most common policies. Due to the fact that these policies are assigned on the server, but need to be enforced on the client, has been somewhat of an issue for myself. Out of curiosity...Is there any standard approach to making these policies. I do understand that we need to override the methods from the PolicyBase class, but is there a recommended way to deploy these policies to all of the clients?

One of my most favorite features with TFS Version Control and Team Foundation Power Toys has to offer is Annotate. With annotate every single line of source code labeled with:

1. The user who made the last changes on each individual line of code
2. The changeset associated with the annotated section
3. The date of the changeset
4. A right click menu which gives you acces to - the changeset details, the history of the file, and the ability to annotate an the previous changeset version.

TFS Annotate Screenshot

Click here to download the latest version of TFS Power Toys

Brain Harry gives us an insight into a few of the changes that we should expect in the next refinement of Annotate.