What's New in Version Control

• Do you use Visual SourceSafe? You can upgrade your code projects, files, version history, labels, and user information from Visual SourceSafe to Team Foundation Server (TFS) or Team Foundation Service. See Upgrading from Visual SourceSafe.

• Use local workspaces to work on version-controlled files even when you're not connected to your Team Foundation Server. See Decide Between Using a Local or a Server Workspace.

• Configure your workspace so that the date and time stamp of local files on your dev machine match the date and time stamp of the file version in version control. See Create and Work with Workspaces.

Use the Pending Changes page in Team Explorer to get a rich persistent view of the work you’ve done and use tools to manage and contribute your pending changes.

Visual Studio automatically detects changes in your local workspace made outside of Visual Studio. For example, if you use Notepad to edit and save a file in your local workspace, the change automatically appears in the Pending Changes page.

See Develop Code and Manage Pending Changes.

• Work with changesets in Team Explorer. See Find and View Changesets.

• See differences more clearly and modify the version in your workspace at that time, using the new Diff window. See Compare Files.

• Your work is interrupted less often by conflicts because Visual Studio tries to automatically resolve certain kinds of conflicts. When you must manually resolve a conflict, do so with greater ease using the improved Merge Tool. See Resolve File Conflicts.

• You can roll back changes in Visual Studio. (In the previous version you could roll back changes only from the command prompt.) See Roll Back Changesets.

• “Friendly” names are shown instead of user IDs (for example, in the User column in Source Control Explorer).

• You can use Visual Studio 2012.1 with Team Foundation Server 2012.1 to create and work with longer file paths. For example, you can create a source control path that contains as many as 399 Unicode characters on your Team Foundation Server. See Naming Restrictions in Team Foundation: Restrictions for Version Control.

• Check-in notes are no longer automatically generated by the system. For example, the system does not automatically generate check-in notes when you create a Team Project Collection.

• You can use the new property change type.

• Check-out locks are not enforceable because of local workspaces and in some cases, are not available. See Understand Lock Types.

• Perform baseless merges from Visual Studio. (In the previous version you could perform baseless merges only from the command prompt.)

• To manage your team project collection and team project version control settings:

  1. In Team Explorer, choose Home, and then choose Settings.

  2. On the Settings page, look under either the Team Project or Team Project Collection section and choose Source Control.

• Manage item security in your web browser.

Note
We are not currently republishing Administering Team Foundation Version Control. We are in the process of revising it for the current version of Visual Studio Team Foundation Server.

• Use the tf property command to manage item properties.

• Some commands have changed. For more information, use the /help option.

Note
We are not currently republishing Team Foundation Version Control Command Reference. We are in the process of revising it for the current version of Visual Studio Team Foundation Server.