Small Orcas Improvements - part 1

After Orcas shipped, many people blogged about new big features that were included there (https://blogs.msdn.com/jeffbe/archive/2007/11/19/visual-studio-team-system-2008-ships.aspx). However, there are also many small improvements, transparent at first to the user, but still allowing him to save time and avoid confusion.This blog post (and at leat one more) is dedicated to those invisible heroes of our day-to-day life :)

Consider workspace mappings. Usually we even don't want to be aware of there existence. Let's just set them (the best is single mapping for whole tree) and forget. Unfortunately sometimes it's not that easy. You work with a project and then you see typo in the local path. Or you have more complex mappings, and you mix to branches in the single workspace. So you type "tf workspace", edit mappings and click OK. The MessageBox is displayed that tells you to perform get in the workspace. If you are in the command line, it's possible that you will do it - it's just "tf get" and you are advanced if you use command line, right ? If you did this in Visual Studio, it's less likely - there is no GET button anywhere. Besides doing get on the whole workspace is really nontrivial - I learnt just recently that you do it by selecting root node in SCE and clicking Get Latest. So you don't do get, the mappings were updated and your files are in the not mapped location, but tfs is aware of them and just waits to move them, as soon as somebody calls get (Most likely surprising the user).

So what we do in Orcas? Very simple - as soon as you changed your mappings, we ask you if you want to do "Get Latest" instead of just warning you. Click Yes and life will be a little safer for you. Just to keep in mind - we will do "Get Latest" so if somebody checked in some changes and you are not ready to get them into your workspace, you probably want to reject doing "Get Latest", and instead sync to changeset that was before those breaking changes.