Multiple Team Foundation Server

Question

We currently have a local TF server in our company, and we are going to make a subset of our open source projects (via Codeplex), but we are having problems mixing two Team Foundation servers in the same solution. It appears that Visual Studio cannot connect to many TF servers at the same time. What is the best way to handle this?

• Solution 1 Linking open source projects only with Codeplex and proprietary projects only for local ones. Link and not link projects depending on who you are connected with → It looks like VS doesn't like the idea. Designs loose bindings and starts behaving strangely.

• Solution 2: Bind everything to the local one and use another open source subset solution → Team Explorer Workspace manager avoids the use of overlapping local folder trees even on different servers, so this is not an option.

• Solution 3 Bind everything to the local using TFS. Use a different control source, such as SVN, for an open source subset. It seems like it will become messy, but we don't have many options.

Are any of the open source projects facing this problem?

Answer 1

I would stick to one single authoritarian repository, or you would end up in a hell of a version. If you intend for external developers to code on the codeplex side, you need to merge your changes with them and integrate their changes into your own internal TFS server.

It is safer to have one single authoritarian repository and just create snapshots for intermediate releases on another.

You can do your fine-grained checks and changes in your internal repository and periodically integrate / merge them with the codeplex code tree. However, what works on one code base may not work so well with another after integration, the sooner you integrate the changes better (you do not work on your isolated branch for too long).