How remove a folder(BIN) from version control, and make it stay out in TFS?

Question

We have a new ASP.NET project on VS 2008 environment, and a new TFS server was setup for it, but originally the bin folder of the project also got checked-in.

The team has about 10 active developers at a time and it a big issue now as some of the common libraries remains checked-out by someone or other.

As per the best practice, I now wish to fix this issue and remove the bin folder out of the version control AND I need to ensure that from now on, when a developer checks-in his project, the bin folder again does not gets checked-in. How do I ensure the both things with the correct approach? It would be great if I can do something as an TFS Admin so that from the next day all developers automatically get some settings pulled into their boxes so that they stop checking-in the bin folder once I have removed it from TFS control.

I am a beginner in TFS, as earlier I used SVN primarily, so please point me to the proper steps, documentation. Thanks!

Answer 1

Delete the bin folder in solution explorer, this will add a delete to the pending checkins.

A build should re-create the bin folder, but not add the folder to the project (and thus there'll be no prompting for it to be added to version control).

This won't prevent someone adding it (or anything it contains) back into version control outside of VS (eg. from the command line, or adding the bin folder back into a project). I don't think there is anything you can do to stop arbitrary files being added except training (if your developers cannot handle this, how do they handle all the other "don't do that"s associated with development?)

Updated, since this was written TFS (including VSTS and Visual Studio¹) allow files and folders to be ignored via a .tfignore file.

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¹ Often Visual Studio does not pick up changes to the .tfignore file, needing a restart.