Team Foundation Server - A programmer's guide

Question

In addition to my Previous topic on

How to use SVN, Branch? Tag? Trunk?

I would like to get in-depth on how a programmer should/could use TFS.

The things that are most interesting to me is not how to set up the server but how you use it on a daily basis. In the area of software engineering where your responsibility not only lies on code but architecture, documentation and other fields. You need to have a collection of your work, preferably in the same place.

So these are my points of interest which I would like to get more knowledge about:

• How would you structure a TFS Workspace / Project to support lots of different customers / projects and maybe different projects per customer?
• Splitting up the folder structure on the above project into different pieces such as, Code, Documents -> Architecture, Requirements and other, what more could there be and what would be a nice commonly used folder structure?
• An easy to browse repository; Again the folder structure here is important however this point is more aimed at different Explorers for the repository, not only the built in Team Foundation Explorer.

These are just a couple of the points that I would like to know more about. Suggestions for beginner's guides, in-depth guides and links covering the topics above would be very much helpful. Please feel free to add other important considerations to this as well.

Answer 1

As already mentioned, the Patterns and Practices guide is a great guide for the whole of using TFS.

http://www.codeplex.com/TFSGuide

However, if you happen to want to focus on branching strategies, you may want to also check out the branching guides (especially the second version) that the VSTS Rangers put together.

• http://www.codeplex.com/TFSBranchingGuideII
• (older version) http://branchingguidance.codeplex.com/

If you end up getting into specific questions that aren't covered by the above, keep in mind you can hit the TFS Version Control forum for help, too.

http://social.msdn.microsoft.com/Forums/en/tfsversioncontrol/threads