TFS SourceControl Branching Merge From Trunk

Question

Hello All,

I'm having trouble with branching in Visual Studio TFS. This may be due to the method in which I am developing, but if this is the case, please let me know what the best practice is with branching and I will change our procedure.

About a month ago, I branched a project so that I could begin developing a new version of the web application, but didn't want the main trunk of the application to be affected by my changes as I tested and tried to get things to a production level status.

So as of a couple days ago, we became aware of a few bugs with the current version of the application that is running in production. I fixed these bugs on the main branch, redeployed the web application, and checked in the bug fixes to the main application trunk. And here is where the problem lies. Now the main trunk has the bug fixes, but my new version branch does not.

Here is my question: How do I go about doing a version compare or something of the sort to get the bug fixes into the branched project?

I may be doing things un-ordinarilly. This is due to my lack of knowledge of branching and development life cycles. Please let me know if there is a better method that you all practice in your development shops.

Cheers,

C

Answer 1

You just need to merge those changes to the new-version-branch.

A good starting point is the branching and merging guidance. Read it to find out how you can organize your branches.

Answer 2

Sounds like you are doing the correct thing to me, you just need to merge your changes into your dev branch.

To merge the changes, you need to be in Source Control Explorer. Right click on the "source" branch (in your case that is the main branch) and then select "Merge". You will then go into the merge wizard where you can pick which branch you would like to merge into (your development branch). Personally, I always pick the "selected changesets" option on that page as it then gives you a list of changesets and you can pick the start and end of the range of changesets that you want to bring into your development branch.

Hope that helps.

Martin.