VS 2012 TFS Workspaces and Projects

Question

I don't seem to get how to work with workspaces and projects. We have two main projects which have no relation to each other. Locally I have made two workspaces, one for Project1 and one for Project2.

If I work on Project1, I select this project from Team Explorer. In the source control explorer I select the workspace for Project1, open the solution from this workspace and I start working.

Question 1: What does it do when I select a project from Team Explorer, it seems to have no effect on what I am doing?

When I do not check in anything and I want to work shortly on project 2, I do the same. So I select project2 from Team Explorer, select the workspace for project 2, open the solution from this workspace and do some work. Now the problem: If I want to checkin the changes I made in project2, I see also the pending changes for project1?? But I am working in project 2 and have also that workspace selected.

I somehow miss the point...

Some background info: we used to work with SVN and recently switched to Team Foundation Service on visualstudio.com, I just am unable to find some answers.

Thanks,

Erik

Answer 1

Workspaces are basically a way to switch between active work streams and configurations. For example, I can be working on a feature branch of a project and I'm asked to quickly fix a bug in the same branch, but without my new changes - or to stop working on that feature and fix a bug in a release branch. Using multiple workspaces are just one way to achieve that quickly.

Effectively, you can think of a workspace as a local repository of code; all the changes I do in there are local to that workspace.

If you have two unrelated projects, then I don't believe that maintaining two separate workspaces will give you any advantage. This article goes into more depth; but my advice would be that if you're not familiar with TFS then try using it without multiple workspaces until you come to an issue that having multiple workspaces will solve for you.