Answers to some VSTS Questions
I taught a VSTS class recently and the following questions came up that I was able to get answered during the online chat that was held by the Team Foundation group. Some of these are generally interesting, so I'll post them here:
Q: When creating a new team project and branching, can you move over work items?
A: Not automatic - this has to be done by copying them from one project to another manually
Q: Can you categorize projects? If I have a large enterprise, I might want one huge scaled TFS with all projects. If so, how would I organize them?
A: Not in V1. All your team projects will show up in alphabetical order in the team explorer.
Q: Does TF source control store each version of the file, or only differences?
A: Version control store the differences in the database for each version getting checked in for that file.
Q: Can you limit the resource list in MS Project when working with work items. It seems to pull from AD?
A: Yes. The list of users is not pulled directly from AD even though that may appear to be the case in the current tech preview releases. The list is actually drawn indirectly from TFS Groups. The set of all users in all TFS Groups is the default list of users available in MS Proj. This list can be constrained by adding additional rules to the Work Item definition to further scope the set of users that are available.
Q: Can TFS be load balanced (Scale-out)? It's just ASP.NET, right?
A: There is both application tier and data tier components to TFS. On the AT it is primarily web services. We will not be supporting NLB clusters for the AT as we store session state in memory. For the data tier we'll be 100% SQL backed by the time we ship. We looking at what if anything additional we would need to do to support failover scenarios.
The answer above worries me, I'm going to try and get on the chat this morning and clarify this.
The following wasn't my question, but I found it worthy of note:
Q: When merging from a branch, will history be retained in a tree like manner as (CVS/Perforce/BitKeeper/...) , and will new files, renames, and deletes be handled properly (VSS does not handle any of those cases cleanly)
A: Yes, Team Foundation Version Control keeps track of merge history. New files, rename, deletes etc are handled properly during branch/merge etc;