Branching tips and more TFS best practices

Recently, TFS (Microsoft Team Foundation Server) has gotten lots of lift, and this can be seen here in Finland as well. More and more companies (and individuals!) are starting to use TFS, which in my opinion is a good thing – especially if TFS replaces the older Visual SourceSafe version control.

However, starting to work with TFS often raises questions about code sharing between (team) projects, branching, and merging. For example, a common need seems to be to decide how to divide common code between several other team projects. Basically, there are two ways to do this:

1. Branching. In this method, common code from the "Common" team project is branched to other team projects (such as "Application 1" and "Application 2". After this, the common code starts to have a life of its own inside the two applications, but can later on be merged back with the base.
2. Workspace sharing. In this option, the common code and the application code is mapped to a local workspace so that the application code projects can reference the assemblies of the common code. In this method, both applications always have the latest version of the common code available.

To read more about the best practices, check out the "Visual Studio TFS Branching Guide 2010" on CodePlex.