Hello,

I understand that VSTS does not support the keyword expansion elements of VSS ($History etc). Given this does anyone know how a developer could identify the version of a code file on their system without accessing source control?

Thanks,

Si...

Unfortunately, at this time there is no way to determine the version of a code file w/o accessing source control.

Ed

http://blogs.msdn.com/edhintz

Don't you consider removing a feature that has been in version control for 3 decades is somewhat of a serious brain seizure?

then SQL sucks more than I'd been led to believe

"expanding" a keyword to put the "id" of the last person to change the file in human readable form doesn't seem very difficult... you know sometimes you just gotta ask them what they were thinking of (like I'm asking you what YOU were thinking of).

IF we don't have readily availalbe the things we got used to in 3 decades of doing version control, where, pray tell, is the "philosophy of our 'new better' version control" document? If it was written from the "ground up" (means, we won't look at anything similar to see if it's useful) there _must_ have been some overall philosophy of use somewhere. How are we to effectively use this "new better" system if we have to guess at how to use it?

I admit I badly _need_ the ability to have multiple people have a file "checked out" for editing (of course it's not the default, but I can live with that).

change sets (atomic commits?) are quite useful.

It will take a while to get used to not having individual file versions.........but a couple of people have "gone ballistic" about no "keyword expansion" and have suggested continuing with VSS <super YUCK> which, of course, won't let multiple people work on the same file.

Richard Berg MSFT wrote:

Not really.  The whole point of building version control on SQL is that you don't need to store this kind of metadata in (fragile, hard to query) text formats anymore. Note that TFS was written from the ground up; we didn't "remove" anything.  It may appear in future versions depending on time & interest.

Your comments make some pretty basic assumptions about working with source code.  You assume that everyone modifying the code has access to checkout and checkin files.  For many reasons, this may not be the case. A file may be distributed to someone outside the team or organization, for whatever reason, and modifications made.  If the version of the file in history is not known, automatic merging of those changes is near impossible.

One scenario I often perform with VSS:  Receive a modified file from 3rd party.  Look at the expanded keywords to find the SCC version of the file they were given.  Checkout said version of file.  Copy modified file overtop of the filesystem version of the file.  Attempt checkin.  The automatic merge will perform the merge notifying me of any conflicts.  Most of the time there are none and the changes are automatically merged.  Sure, not a fun task; but a task I've had to perform in many different organizations.

Without automatic keyword expansion this type of scenario cannot automatically be supported.  External tracking of individual file versions would need to be performed, leading to human error.

Why would the implementation detail of storing revision information in SQL server make keyword expansion in TFS any less useful?  Maybe the PowerToys team can make a quick toy to perform this?

Even later....

Just had my first encounter with TFS and was shocked by the absence of keyword expansion!

A header with at least $Log$ and $Revision$ in every source file has always been mandatory in my projects. I need to able to check the revision number again and again without accessing the damn SQL Server. I'm not paranoid, I'm human! I make mistakes and this one of the ways I can prevent them.

And I need the logs so I might get a clue where to start searching for a bug - yes, I know they are on the SQL Server but I don't want to HAVE TO go there all the time.

And then there is one of my favourites: Expanding the keyword information into a constant or variable. Can be very useful sometimes, it's extremely easy and always up to date!

So please, please bring back the keywords!