TFS - setting up Team Project Collections for different Visual Studio versions

Question

When migrating source controlled Visual Studio projects from Visual SourseSafe to TFS 2012, is there any recommendations with regards to setting up Team Project Collections when you have projects that are built in multiple versions of Visual Studio?

We have some old projects, which we maintain that are built in VS2005 and VS2008, with newer work being done in VS2010 and more recently in VS2012.

One suggestion is to have multiple Team Project Collections for each version of Visual Studio. So a separate Collection for VS2005, VS2008, VS2010 and VS2012 projects. I can see causing issues if we want to move or migrate projects.

The other option is to have a good tree structure under one Collection, regardless of Visual Studio versions.

I can see the benefits of having multiple Collections, but only when the projects within them are distinctly separate but I can't see any benefit of splitting Colelctions by VS versions when some projects are loosely related.

Any suggestions or guidance would be gratefully received.

Answer 1

The most outer boundary in TFS is a Team Project Collection. You cannot share code / branches between Team Project Collections. You can however share code between team projects that exist in one collection. From experience, i would suggest you have one Team Project per product, which can house all the different versions of each product.

Having separate folders for the trunk/root of each version would be a good start and give you the correct isolation for a per version branch strategy going forward.

Just to point out - you dont have to migrate a solution to Visual Studio 2012 to use TFS 2012. There is an update for VS 2010 that enables it to work with TFS 2012 and one for VS 2008 also. Support for VS 2005 was mentioned, and there is a workaround.