Strange Visual Studio TFS behavior when working on a Mac file share/unc path

Question

I'm working on a Mac with Yosemite. Yesterday I installed Update 4 of Visual Studio 2013 and noticed a strange behavior when working with TFS 2013 (and TFS as SCM). My source files are mapped to a UNC path on my Mac as a local workspace.

When I do changes to my files and try to check-in I get the following message:

\\psf\Home\Documents\My\TFS\Customerproject\Source\Calculation\WeightCalculation.cs: Access to the path is denied.

When I shelve my changes and unshelve them, I can check-in the file. I can reproduce this on every file, when I get the message "access denied".

Update I just played with it a bit and: I don't need to unshelve the files. It's enough to shelve them and check "preserve pending changes locally". After that, I can check-in.

I tried to remove the "read-only" flag in Windows and I did `chmod -R 777 Source" on the source folder to allow access from everyone. But this does not solve the problem. Only the shelve workaround works.

Starting Visual Studio as administrator does not solve the problem either.

Anyone else noticed this behavior or has an idea how to solve it?

Answer 1

What I did was to change the local workspace to a server workspace in Visual Studio (macOS Sierra + Windows 10 on Parallels);

• File > Source Control > Advanced > Workspaces...
• Select your workspace in the list and hit Edit...
• Hit Advanced >>
• Change Location to Server and hit OK and Close

Now you should be able to check in without needing to shelve.

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Note that there are some differences between a local and server workspace, but in my case it works just fine with a server workspace;

Why should I use a local workspace?

When you use a local workspace, you get the following advantages:

Work offline easily. You can quickly begin editing a file when your network connection is unavailable or unreliable. From Solution Explorer you can add, edit, delete, rename, undo, and compare items in your workspace even when you're not connected to your Team Foundation Server.

Easily restore files that you have deleted locally. To restore locally deleted files, just get your files.

Visual Studio automatically detects changes. When you add or delete files outside of Visual Studio, the program automatically detects these changes.

Important: One drawback to using a local workspace is that performance degrades as the number of items increases. See the next section for details.

When might I need to use a server workspace?

When you use a server workspace, Visual Studio keeps only one copy of each file. This can significantly reduce disk space usage and improve performance when you have a lot of items. We recommend that you use a server workspace if:

Your workspace contains more than 100,000 items.

You want to use Visual Studio 2010 or earlier versions to work with the workspace.

You need to use the Enable get latest on check-out option.

Work offline with difficulty and with poor performance. When you are offline in a server workspace, you cannot work with your local files because they are read-only until you check them out. You can check out files only from Solution Explorer, and only after you switch to offline mode (as explained below). While you're offline, you can't perform any other operations, such as add, delete, rename, or undo.

Tip: You can improve responsiveness by enabling asynchronous checkout. For more information, see Manage team project collection workspace settings for your team.