Tuesday 11 December 2012

Workspace Templates: a useful helper for non-VS users

If you have a user which doesn’t use Visual Studio (reasons may vary: designers, stakeholders, analysts, etc.) but uses the Windows Explorer Integration brought you by the Team Foundation Server Power Tools, this user must go through the Team Explorer at least for setting the workspace.

Letting them use the Team Explorer is a shocking experience, from a users’ point of view: they are not used to the complexity of Visual Studio, and this can lead to errors and problems.

In order to fix that, we can use the tf workspace command-line tool, with the /template switch.

It’s extremely easy:

tf workspace /new /template:myworkspace;TFSAdmin /collection:http://server:8080/tfs/Collection

It takes a myworkspace linked to the user (in my case, TFSAdmin) and it creates for the current user a copy of it. So the project is already mapped, and the user can start using the Windows Explorer Integration alone.

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