A workspace mapping is a list of active and cloaked items. You can add Team Foundation version control server items to the mapped list in the workspace using the /map option. You can also exclude an item from the workspace explicitly by using the /cloak option. You can only cloak the items that have a mapped parent. Cloaking is an effective way to improve the speed of batch Get operations and to conserve space on disk.

Use cloaking with discretion. To avoid compilation and integration problems, you should only cloak those items that you know to be outside the scope of your current and future projects, such as images and external documentation files.

You can use the /unmap and /decloak options to selectively delete mapped and cloaked entries from the workspace mapping.

By default, workspace mappings are applied recursively. When you map a local folder to a Team Foundation version control server folder, the system implicitly creates a mapping between all its current and future subfolders. For example, if you map $/projects to c:\projects, subsequently add a project called $/projects/project_one, and then run a get of the workspace, Team Foundation automatically creates a local working folder named project_one in the C:\projects directory.

In this example, you can use a wildcard, "*", to map a server folder and its immediate items to your local workspace:

tf workfold $/projects/MyTeamProject/* C:\MyLocalWorkfold\MyTeamProject

In this example, you can override the automatically-created mapping between $/projects/project_one and C:\projects\project_one by using the workfold command as follows:

tf workfold $/projects/project_one C:\DifferentWorkfold

Mappings of uncloaked folders that are located beneath a cloaked folder in the version control hierarchy can be mapped to your local workspace.