Effective usage of Workspaces in Visual Studio?

Question

I am wondering what is the best way to use workspaces in visual studio. We have 150+ webservices that are all part of the same team project $/MyTeamProject without being related at all. The reason for them all being part of the same team project as they are all maintained by the same group of people within our organization.

Each webservice has the following structure

$/MyTeamProject/WebService1
$/MyTeamProject/WebService1/Main
$/MyTeamProject/WebService1/Release/1.0
$/MyTeamProject/WebService1/Release/1.1

$/MyTeamProject/WebService2
$/MyTeamProject/WebService2/Main
... etc.

I am wondering what is the proper way to use workspaces with this setup as currently there is only mapping for the teamproject so all my webservices are part of the same workspace. Should I create mapping for the main branch and for each release branch as a separate workspace or should I map each webservice to its own workspace such as $/MyTeamProject/WebService1?

Any help would be appreciated.

I can't put each of the webservices as its own teamproject as the tfs is being shared between several groups with the same magnitude of projects and therefore we are limited by our own teamproject for all of the webservices.

Answer 1

If you have one workspace per webservice then you will get 150*#releases workspaces. This will get really hard to manage for build versions, labelling etc. Fewer workspaces will mean less builds to manage.

I would recommend having a workspace per release. Generally you would probably only be working on one release at a time and this will allow you to manage all code for a single release effectively. Also you can then map your workspaces on the client into a more logical structure as you allude to in the question.

For example

\Projects\MyTeamProject\Main\WebService1
\Projects\MyTeamProject\Main\WebService2 ...

\Projects\MyTeamProject\Release1.0\WebService1
\Projects\MyTeamProject\Release1.0\WebService2 ...

\Projects\MyTeamProject\Release1.1\WebService1
\Projects\MyTeamProject\Release1.1\WebService2 ...

etc

Answer 2

You said that the webservices was not related at all. I then assume that they are released separately.

I can't see any reason to use multiple workspaces in your scenario. I suggest that you remove the mapping from the top level project "MyTeamProject". Then you have flexibility to map the subfolders to whatever local folder you want.