SVN tagging equivalent in TFS 2012

Question

I recently migrated to the TFS 2012 and I have worked with SVN for a long time.

In SVN I used "Tags" to mark some important "checkpoints" of development, ie when I finished a software version (alpha, beta) I created a Tag for that version. If some mistake happen, I am "protected".

Now, I need the same behaviour (or equivalent) to use in the TFS source control, but I'm confused as to its structure.

How I use "Tagging" in TFS?

Answer 1

In Team Foundation Server, labels are similar to tags in other version control system; a label contains files at a specific version.

When we release some product, we snapshot the entire team project as a label - that is to say that we create some label 11_Release to point to our 11.0.0 release, and it will contain $/TEE (our Team Project) at version Latest. We then unthaw the branch and allow check-ins to proceed.

Exactly how this works will depend on your process, of course. You need not necessarily apply the latest version to that label, it could, in fact, be some other changeset or even date version spec.

Answer 2

I'm pretty new to TFS but "Labels" are indeed the equivalent for as far as I know. You have to keep in mind though that they aren't the same thing as tags though. A label is really just a name for a snapshot of the files in TFS.

There is no separate branch for a tag like in SVN. In other words, if you have a tag "v 1.0" in SVN, then you can still checkin changes to it in case you need to make a small fix or addition. In TFS this is not possible with labels.