Branching Guidance for Team Foundation Server

  • Article

About a year ago at our Dev & IT-Pro Days 2006 Steven Wilssens delivered a session on advanced version control and branching strategies with Team Foundation Server.

Despite Steven was announced as a speaker this year, he just notified me that - due to an overload of work for Mix07 - he won't be able to make it to this years' Dev & IT-Pro Days 2007. With the event only a couple of days away this is very short notice. But we'll do what's possible to have another excellent speaker covering the topic.

Back to the original subject of this post: Team Foundation Server. Yesterday Jeff Beehler announced the availability (finally I would say!) of Branching Guidance for Team Foundation Server. A couple of highlights from Jeff's post:

"While the product documentation will tell you how each of our tools works, it doesn't provide insight into the best practice usage of each. The guidance that we recently released attempts to fill that gap in the area of version control and how to best work with branches."

"What you'll read in this guidance isn't some theoretical description of how things should work in a perfect world but instead has been pressure tested and proved to be effective through actual TFS projects. In fact, you'll find examples pulled directly from our own teams experiences as well."

Go get the branching info on Microsoft Team Foundation Server Branching Guidance from https://www.codeplex.com. This also means that the TFS Product Team is ready to take your feedback and incorporate it directly into the guidance.

Here's the high level overview:

  • Introduction
  • Parallel Development
  • Branching Defined
  • Creating Isolation in Team Foundation Server
  • General Branching Structure Guidance
  • Branching Strategies
  • Broad Areas of Branching Isolation
  • Creating Your Branching Strategy
  • Defining Your Code Promotion Model
  • Feature Crews: How Microsoft Does It
  • End-to-End Implementation Scenario
  • Appendix

Download the .pdf from the site or get started here.

Technorati tags: Branching, Team Foundation Server, code promotion, software configuration management