Visual Studio ALM … stepping through Brian’s HOLs (Part 4) – Branch Visualization

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Continued from Visual Studio ALM … stepping through Brian’s HOLs (Part 3) – Class Coupling, giving us the following bread crumbs to date:

Define Business Requirements > Project Planning > Code Discovery > Code Discovery > Class Coupling … today’s menu includes branch visualization.

Focus Area Reference Material Suggested steps for the quick reference poster
Branch Visualization

Branches in Team Foundation Server (TFS)

  • Branches are now first class objects, with their own icon in TFS 2010.
  • Right-click on branches to display properties, including:
    • General
    • Relationships
    • Permissions
  • We can use visualizations to show us relationships between branches.
  • We can visualize where and how changesets fit into the branches.
  • We can use drag and drop in the branch visualization.

Tracking a change (steps)

  1. Right-Click on appropriate branch and select properties.
  2. Take not of relevant change, in our case changeset 71.
  3. Right-Click on changeset and select “Track Changeset”
  4. Select the branches you would like to include in the relationship view
  5. The view shows us where the changeset has been applied, in this case production 1.0 only.
  6. (1) Drag changeset 71 and drop it on the Main branch. (2) Complete the Merge and check-in pending changes.
  7. (1) Select Rerun to refresh the diagram. (2) Take note that changeset 71 has now been merged (RI’d) to Main as changeset 72.
  8. Select Timeline Tracking to display the order of merges.

In part 5, we will look at various debugging and testing features as covered in Brian Keller’s HOLs. May the bug bashing begin …

| Acronyms | HOL - Hands-On-Lab | RI – Reverse Integration (merge) | TFS – Team Foundation Server |