When do I create a TFS workspace?

Question

I have had a nagging feeling for some time that I may be ignoring useful qualities of TFS Workspaces. The site here provides some great background on what they are: http://www.woodwardweb.com/teamprise/000333.html.

However, given this information, I don't really understand when I ought to create a new workspace. Do I create one for each "project"? Do I create one for each project-branch? Do I need to create mirror workspaces on every machine that I intend to work on? I'm not sure what I need to consider when making this decision.

Is there a best practice describing under what circumstances to use different workspaces?

Note: although it may be interesting to learn what practice others follow, I am more interested in learning about how to make the decision myself. I'm not really asking "When do you create new workspaces?". Instead, I am asking "How do I decide when to create a new workspace?".

Answer 1

A workspace is defined per machine, per team project collection (TPC), therefore you need at least one workspace per machine you are working on, for each TPC you use.

Having a snapshot of the entire TPC on your machine might be both wasteful (you might not need access to projects or solutions that are maintained by other teams or developers, so you might want to create a workspace per team project or even one workspace per solution.

If you find yourself working on more than one task at the same time, you might want to create one workspace per task. This is considered a best-practice, and will allow you to separate the changes you make and check them in one task at a time (e.g. one workspace for a development task such as build a new UI, and another for fixing a bug recently found by QA).

Workspace per task works particularly well if your task vertically crosses multiple solutions (e.g. adding a UI, business logic, SOA service and updating the schema on a remote database, all as part of adding a new feature to your product); A task will rarely (if ever) cross team projects and should never cross TPCs.