Multiple Team Foundation Server

Question

We currently have a local TF Server here in our company, and we are about to make a subset of our projects open source (via Codeplex), but we are having problems mixing two Team Foundation Servers in the same solution. Looks like Visual Studio can't be connected to many TF Servers at the same time. What's the best way to deal with that?

• Solution 1: Bind Open source projects to Codeplex only, and proprietary projects to local only. Bind and un bind projects depending where are you connected --> Looks like VS doesn’t like the idea. Projects loose bindings and start to behave strangely.

• Solution 2 Bind all to local and use another solution for the open source subset --> Team Explorer Workspace manager avoid you using overlapping local folder trees, even on different servers, so it is not an option.

• Solution 3 Bind all to local using TFS. Use another source control like SVN for the open source subset. It looks it will become messy easily, but we don't have a lot of options.

Someone with open source projects has faced a problem like this??

Answer 1

I would stick to one single authorative repository or you'd end up with a version hell at some point. If you intend to have external developers contributing code on the codeplex side you will need to merge your changes with theirs and also integrate their changes on your own internal TFS server.

It's safer to have one single authoritive repository and just create snapshots for milestone releases on the other.

You could do your fine grained check-ins and modifications on your internal repository and periodically integrate/merge them to the codeplex code-tree. However what works on one codebase may not work so well on the other after integrating, the sooner you integrate changes the better (don't work on your own isolated branch too long).