The TFSings you do

In our tfs repo we have a structure – a dev folder which keeps dev branches in it. For one of our products, turns out we don’t need that structure, cause for the past 2 years, there were 2 cases in which this actually helped. In order to keep things simple I wanted to perform an easy (one would assume) task. Instead of having a /dev/default branch I wanted to have a /dev branch. Turns out, that TFS does not handle this case well at all.

The fastest way I found to perform this is:

• convert the ‘default’ branch to a folder
• move the ‘default’ folder one level up (so now it’s alongside the ‘dev’ folder
• check in
• delete the ‘dev’ folder
• check in
• rename the ‘default’ folder to ‘dev’
• check in
• convert the new ‘dev’ folder to branch

To me, it looks like an overkill…if anyone knows a better way, I’d love to know.

There’s another interesting thing that popped up during this operation. If you happen to have another branch in the old ‘dev’ folder, you’re in for a world of pain.

Looks like TFS needs better branch handling.

Cheers