Branching and Merging Guide v2 for Visual Studio 2012 RTM has RTW&#39;d

Friday, August 24, 2012

Branching and Merging Guide v2 for Visual Studio 2012 RTM has RTW'd

Visual Studio ALM + Team Foundation Server Blog - ALM Rangers Branching and Merging guide for Visual Studio 2012 is available

As mentioned in Cowabunga! Visual Studio ALM Rangers Readiness “GIG” goes RTM! the RTM version of the Branching and Merging Guide for Visual Studio 2012 was not included in the sim-ship wave. But we have just received the following signal from the product owner Matthew Mitrik and the project lead Micheal Learned:

The team has released the following bits, with more to come:

Guidance

Branching and Merging Guide

Cheatsheets

Advanced Plan

Basic Branch Plan

Code Promotion Plan

Feature Branch Plan

Picking a Strategy

Standard Branch Plan

Terminology

Hands-on Labs

Local Workspaces, Diff and Merge HOL

Shared Resources HOL

Illustrations

Reusable Illustrations PPTX collection

..."

Visual Studio Team Foundation Server Branching and Merging Guide - V2 - Visual Studio 2012

In the "Everything";

Here's a snip from the Guide itself;

Introduction
Welcome to the Microsoft® Visual Studio® (VS) 2012 Team Foundation Server (TFS) Branching Guide!

The purpose of this guidance is to provide insightful and practical guidance around branching and merging with Team Foundation Server by the Visual Studio ALM Rangers, a special group with members from the Visual Studio Product group, Microsoft Services, Microsoft Most Valued Professionals (MVP) and Visual Studio Community Leads. The Rangers mission is to provide out of band solutions to missing features and guidance. This guide targets 200-300 level users of Team Foundation Server. The target audience of this guide is intermediate to advanced users of Team Foundation Server with in-depth understanding of the product features in a real-world environment.

This release of the guidance builds upon the previous release with updates to core materials as well as guidance on new topics/scenarios. There is coverage for new version control features available in Team Foundation Server 2012. You will find guidance around local workspaces, managing shared resources in version control, merge improvements, and baseless merging.

Branching and merging of software is a vast topic. It is imperative to realize that every organization is different, and there is ‘no one size fits all’ branching strategy. In this guidance, the focus is primarily on practical and real world scenarios of branching that you can apply immediately. We avoid discussing the mechanics of branching but rather focus on best practices and real world examples of patterns that work for many of the business cases we have seen. This guide is supplemented by HOL activities, and updated branch diagrams that will continue to be updated over time to include additional scenarios. We encourage participation from our user community to submit ideas for new scenarios that we will add to these packages. These new packages that will become available on CodePlex.com will be refreshed based on user feedback on a regular basis. Now, let’s take a look at what’s new in this release.

The guidance will have some new verbiage and recommendations around some of our existing branching plans, as well as add some coverage for new branching plans.

This guidance introduces you to local workspace which is a new concept in Team Foundation Server 2012. We provide new guidance around effectively managing shared resources in source control by discussing various common scenarios and describing the pros and cons with each approach.

There is in-depth coverage of merge improvements in Team Foundation Server 2012.

Different scenarios for baseless merging are discussed in this release of the guidance.