In my blog post SQL Server devs–what source control system do you use, if any? (answer and maybe win free stuff) of 18th October 2012 I complained about one aspect of Source Control in Team Foundation Server (TFS) that infuriates me:
…there are aspects to TFS source control that annoy me day-in, day-out. Chief among them has to be the fact that it uses a file’s read-only property to determine if a file should be checked-out or not and, if it determines that it should, it will happily do that check-out on your behalf without you even asking it to. I didn’t realise how ridiculous this was until I first used SVN about three years ago – with SVN you make any changes you wish and then use your source control client to determine which files have changed and thus be checked-in; the notion of “check-out” doesn’t even exist. That sounds like a small thing but you don’t realise how liberating it is until you actually start working that way.
This evening I have been noodling around in Visual Studio 2012 and noticed that this behaviour has changed, as I shall now demonstrate. I opened an XML file (an SSDT Publish Profile file as it happens) that was checked into TFS Source Control:
I made a change to the file and instantly it got checked-out:
I then simply hit CTRL+Z to reverse the change I had made earlier and CTRL+S to save. At that instant the earlier check-out was reversed:
Finally…TFS Source Control now determines whether any changes have actually occurred before considering the file “checked-out”. I know this seems like a really minor change but I promise you, it delights me – especially given I use TFS so much (not through choice I might add).
Perhaps this new behaviour is common knowledge in the TFS fraternity but it was news to me so I figure it might be news to some of you too. Hopefully I’m not the only one that is suitably enamoured upon learning about it.
Note that I am using Visual Studio 2012 and Team Foundation Service.
@Jamiet