TFS Migration Tools – More questions, news and stats

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Blue Man Leaning Against a Stack of Papers Clipart Illustration More questions?!?

We received another batch of interesting questions and I would like to summarize them here and include the answers, courtesy of Bill and his team, and VSTS Rangers working on the exciting initiative.

  1. Does the migration toolkit support merging operations … will a merge be pended as merge check in operation on TFS side?
    • Yes, the migration toolkit supports merging operations that are pended as merge check-in operations on the TFS side. Playing back branch/merge operations from any version control system is where the complexity starts to increase, though, so it is worth budgeting some additional planning and development time if you need to support branch/merge operations in the proof of concept project.  
  2. Does the migration toolkit support baseless merges?
    • Yes, it shows up as an Edit.
  3. Is it possible to split the migration into several chunks, for example 1st Day: CS 1 to 100, 2nd Day: CS 101 to 200.
    • There are quite a few places where large operations are naturally paged with no user intervention. Snapshot generation is an example. If the user picks a starting changeset number that is not the beginning of time the full tree at that point in time needs to get added to TFS. The tool will automatically do that in 100K change action pages. There is no direct support for paging by changeset number during the initial migration, but the tool is restartable, so the user could interrupt migration at the end of day 1 and restart it on day 2.
  4. Does the migration toolkit write any log files about the migrated files. Is it possible to trace the new changesets in TFS back to the source system?
    • Yes, there is a complete historical record of the relationship between the systems kept in the DB used by the TFS Integration Platform. We have a simple web service over that DB in our production environment (TFS to TFS sync) that surfaces this information for users (and other tools). In addition, the changeset number for the source system will be written in the TFS comment field for the changeset.
  5. Why is the table of content / structure so flat in the TFS Migration Tools Core SDK Compiled Help file?
    • The help file is generated from the code base and the content/structure is based on the namespaces. At this stage the namespaces are flat, resulting in a flat content view, but Bill’s team is investigating the possibility of supportive code refactoring to improve the help file content and structure.
  6. Why are the Windows SharePoint Services (WSS) samples not included in current early bits?
    • The new samples are under construction and will be included in early drops during September and October as they are available.
  7. Why are we not covering conflict resolution in the Getting Started guide?
    • The Getting Started guide started its life as a Hands-On-Lab (HOL) manual for the internal readiness event, TechReady, and we were constrained with a recommended 45 minute HOL duration. Due to this constraint and the complexity of conflict resolution we decided to step around all the possible conflicts as part of the HOL. In the revised Getting Started guide, however, you will find a basic scenario (the current HOL content) and a advanced scenario. In the advanced scenario we are stepping back and instead of stepping around the conflicts, we run into them and resolve them step-by-step.
  8. The Getting Started guide uses team project names TP-A and TP-B in the basic scenario, and TP-C in the advanced scenario. Can we not use more meaningful names?
    • The biggest nightmare for many of us in the past was the fact that the TFS Migration Tools were revolving around a configuration file, that there were no user-friendly editing tools (unless you consider Notepad and XML as friendly) and that any error in the configuration file could result in a disastrous no point of return. Again we were constrained by the HOL 45-min timeline and initially expected the HOL attendees to hand-craft the configuration file … which is why we introduced short team project names, that minimized noise in the configuration file and the possibility of typing errors. TP-A and TP-B, for Team Project A and Team Project B, were born, starting the debate around more user friendly names. As one name is meaningful and user-friendly to some of you, but confusing to the next, we decided to stay with TP-A and TP-B for the time being … we may introduce other names when the rest of the project has settled down.

imageStats … dogfooding

So how do the dogfooding stats look this week? Here is a glimpse of the ongoing churn, which is a very good sign indeed :)

image … they literally moved more than 1 million WIT changesets to date!

News … what’s on the next menu?

The VSTS Rangers are currently working with Bill’s team to understand, document and introduce conflict resolution and the new administrative user interface. When we ship an early ALPHA of the new TFS Migration Tools for testing in September, we will include a revised “Getting Started – Hands On Lab” manual, which includes the current basic scenario and an advanced scenario taking you through Version Control (VC) and Work Item Tracking (WIT) conflict and resolution thereof.

If you are interested in evaluating the early bits, then please give us a shout.