Visual Studio – Should XmlDocument.xml Be Included in Source Control

The advantages git has come from tossing out a lot of old assumptions about what a VCS should do. The disadvantages git has come from not being able to leverage prior experience and not being able to do things the way you are used to.

If you are going to switch from something else to git, try to start tabula-rasa (though it is impossible to truly do in practice). Evaluate it based on what it does and how well it does it, not on how it does it compared to how you are used to doing it. It's not that you expect too much, it's that your expectations are orthogonal to what git provides. If you're married to GUI operation, you'll be disappointed. Git does have gui tools available, but they don't add much. That's not a failure to provide them so much as there isn't that much that a gui can add. GitK does help, not in day-to-day operations, but rather in visualizing the branch structure and examining or searching history.

Here's a goofy analogy for what I mean by "orthogonal". One of the things you can do with a newspaper is wrap fish in it, or use it to line a birdcage. But those are not essential to the function of a newspaper, those are incidental features of the form it comes in. Expecting git to "check in files", or "allow you to select projects", or provide a "connect to..." is kind of like expecting to be able to wrap fish or line your birdcage with a newspaper's website.

Here are some ways I have been able to accomplish similar tasks in TFS 2010 (Disclaimer: I haven't been able to try them in 2012 yet, and I'm not having luck finding 2012 documentation for this, so be careful and try them out in a test environment first):

• Write a TFS plugin (see http://blog.hinshelwood.com/team-foundation-server-2010-event-handling-with-subscribers/) - this involves dropping in some DLLs that are ran in-process with TFS. If you go this route make sure you handle all exceptions gracefully, and that your plugin doesn't take a long time to execute. Installing your own TFS plugin also takes down TFS for about 10 seconds while TFS loads your DLL(s).
• Write a plugin that triggers a job extension (see http://blogs.microsoft.co.il/blogs/assafstone/archive/2011/07/29/how-to-write-a-robust-tfs-server-plugin-with-job-extensions.aspx) - I have used this a few times to do some longer running tasks, as well as to do a consistency check over all work items. This also allows you to access the server-side TFS API (which is poorly documented, to the point that most people just use the Client API anyway. But if you can figure out how to use it, more power to you)
• Subscribe to TFS SOAP event for work items being changed (see http://www.ewaldhofman.nl/post/2010/08/02/How-to-use-WCF-to-subscribe-to-the-TFS-2010-Event-Service-rolling-up-hours.aspx) - this does not require any TFS downtime when you make changes, and doesn't take away from available processing power on your TFS server.

As for the OData, I have also been struggling for the last couple of days to get that built, and have had a similar difficulty with the Azure tools. The only reason I am trying to get OData to work is for accessing TFS from mobile devices, since the TFS client API DLLs aren't portable. Brian Keller (as of Oct 2011) says the following about the OData service (see http://blogs.msdn.com/b/briankel/archive/2011/10/26/odata-service-for-team-foundation-server-2010-v1.aspx):

• "Currently we have no plans to support true work item editing / creation"
• "I would like to continue to iterate on this and add value over time. I should make it clear, however, that this is not an official release from the TFS engineering team. The TFS engineering team has reviewed the service and approved of the approach we are taking, but there is no official support for this service"

I share your frustration about future-proofing. As of yet I have not seen any solution that won't need adjustment in the next iteration. The closest I have come is using the TFS Client API, since I have only noticed subtle differences between 2010 and 2012.