Team Foundation Server workspaces
Many developers who first start working with Team Foundation Server find it easy to get wrapped around the axle when it comes to TFS Workspaces. They’re not very intuitive. The simple explanation I give about workspaces when asked, is that they’re a mapping between the files on your hard disk and the TFS server. But there are a lot of additional “features” that come with workspaces, and this is where the non-intuitive part comes into play.
Mickey Gousset has a nice article about TFS 2010 workspaces and what they’re about, which was recently posted online in Visual Studio Magazine here. And there’s a host of documentation about workspaces in the MSDN Library, located here.
Very good information, indeed.
BUT, change is coming, and life will get much easier.
Just the other day, Brian Harry blogged about Version Control Model Enhancements in TFS 11. In the post he talks about the concept of local workspaces. They’re very intuitive, simple to use, and make working with source code in an offline mode very easy. At the bottom of the entry Brian included nice a video by Matt Mitrik that walks through some scenarios using local workspaces in the next release of TFS.
-- bliz