How to undo a pending change in a workspace you no longer have

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Not that it’s a huge deal to have stale workspaces lying around, but if you’ve ever wondered how to undo a pending change on a workspace you no longer have (e.g. if you repaved your computer to install Windows 7 and didn’t delete your TFS workspaces first), here’s how to do it:

1. Fire up the Visual Studio command prompt (Start –> Visual Studio –> Visual Studio Tools, Visual Studio Command Prompt)

2. If you have a valid workspace against the server of interest, change into that directory.

3. Run the following tf.exe command:

tf undo /workspace:OLDWORKSPACENAME <filespec…>

For example:

tf undo /workspace:VistaLaptop $/Spark/WidgetBox/ /r

In this example, the name of the old workspace I’m trying to undo changes from is “VistaLaptop”.  The filespec for the changes I’m undoing is “$/Spark/WidgetBox”, which is a folder name.  To undo all the changes I had pending against that tree, I added the “/r” (recursive) switch.

If you don’t have a valid workspace against that server anymore, you can just add the /server switch to specify the server name or URL.