Is it possible to do a server-only rename in TFS source control?

Question

As of late, my team and I have been hard at work turning our inherited source code into something we can live with. Part of this process is to make the source control image look a little more like what most people might expect to find when browsing a repository.

The original structure contains a branch called "Branches", the contents of which are what one would find in a "Tags" folder in systems like Subversion. Since "Branches" is a bit too non-specific for my tastes, I wanted to change it to "Tags" -- but it would seem that I cannot do that unless I create a workspace mapped to the root of the repository and then create a working copy from it. On this project that is a huge file transfer (lots of old tags).

Please tell me that I have just overlooked the obvious and should really spend more time reading the instructions. Is there no simple way to do this without pulling everything to the client first? I really enjoy most aspects of TFS, but this is something that would have taken 15 seconds or less in Subversion -- so I hope I'm just missing something.

Thanks in advance to any responders.

Answer 1

Hi Jon,

You don't need to get the whole folder but you need to get the folder itself. You can't do this from within the IDE but you can from the command-line:

tf get c:\dev\

Because we haven't specified the /recursive option it will only get the immediate children of c:\dev\, which would be folders such as trunk and branches.

For there you can rename the folder:

tf rename c:\dev\branches c:\dev\tags

And then check-in the rename.

Regards,

William D. Bartholomew (Team System MVP)