In TFS, how can I cherry-pick a changeset to an unrelated branch?

Question

I have a very messy TFS structure that I am trying to clean up (thanks to my predecessor). I now have a situation where I need to bring changesets selectively from one branch to another where they don't have a parent/child relationship and I don't want those changes to pass through their shared trunk. How can I do this?

I have tried a baseless merge - In TFS, how do I do a baseless merge on specific changesets? - which told me that there were no changes to merge.

What I want to achieve is something like this TFS : Can a shelveset be restored to another location? except with a changeset.

In GIT I think this would be a simple cherry-pick.

My structure looks something like:

   Y-C1-C2-C3
  /
X-------------
    \
     Z

And the question is how do I get C2 from Y into Z without passing through X?

Answer 1

We have a similar situation, though, in our case, we do a baseless merge from multiple branches into a "scratch" build branch. The only way we were able to do this is by writing our own utility leveraging the TFS API.

The good news is, you should be able to accomplish this in less than a couple hundred lines of code.

The basic steps are:

• Connect to TFS
• Get an instance of the VersionControlServer (let's call it VCS)
• Create a workspace
• Do a VCS.GetChangeset()
• Iterate through the Changes to get a list of items that have changed
• Perform a Workspace.Merge for each of the items from your source branch to your destination branch.
• Check in the items in the destination branch.
• Delete workspace

Answer 2

Its simpler to do it using Visual studio.

In Visual studio use the Source Control Merge wizard to merge the unrelated branches.

It has an option to merge selective changesets. The only restriction is that the changesets must be consecutive