TFS & Visual Studio integration - Get Latest does not always work?

Question

I'm developing in Visual Studio 2005, using TFS as the source control. Whenever I haven't been working on the solution for a while, I always do a recursive Get Latest in Solution Explorer.

However, this doesn't always seem to work. If I know I don't have the latest version of a file, even right-clicking this (in Solution Explorer), choosing Get Specific Version and ticking the "Force get" box doesn't work.

I seem to need to open up the TFS Source Control window, and there force a Get of the file in question.

Also, the Solution Explorer often has the little "checked out to someone else" icon next to files, but when I check in Source Control, they're not checked out at all!

I'd just like to know if these problems are widespread, whether they persist in VS2008 (I haven't used TFS for a big project in 2008 yet), and if there are any fixes or workarounds.

Answer 1

1) I would not make a habit out of Get Latest from Solution Explorer. Even if it always worked 100% bug free, it is far slower and less reliable than doing it from the command line or Source Control Explorer. SlnExp has to crawl your whole project structure and issue non-recursive calls...pseudo algorithm:

parse sln file
foreach project in sln
    TFS_GET makefile
    parse makefile
    enumerate sourcefiles[]
    TFS_GET sourcefiles[]
loop

SCE requires no parsing and issues one single recursive webservice call. In addition to the performance gain, this is much safer:

(a) Build-time dependencies aren't always part of a project's file list. Executable tools, 3rd party assemblies, and deployment scripts are all common examples. SCE will download them, SlnExp won't.

(b) Scoping Get calls down to specific files won't yield the expected result when a file is renamed or moved. At best, the "old" name is deleted from disk; at worst, nothing appears to happen at all. (this may be the cause of the bug you reported) In order for a file to truly be renamed/moved in sync with the server, the old & new paths must both be inside the scope of the Get.

2) There have been many bug fixes to the SlnExp "glyphs" over the years. I won't claim that VS2008 SP1 is perfect in this regard but it is definitely improved.