Context: I’m currently working as an intern at a company which has made the move to TFS 2010 from VSS. TFS has been in use here for a couple of months now, but in the early period after the move some ‘mistakes’ were made in setting up the projects. After while the need for a custom team project template was recognized. The template has been developed and is now being introduced into the organisation. (small web development company, many small projects)
Question:
We’re trying to migrate old projects to the new template by setting up new pojects with the custom template. We’d like to move the sources of the old projects into projects making use of the new template. The history of the sources should be preserved for support reasons. It is undesireable for the old projects to appear in the Team Collections’ Team Projects list, so we’d like to hide them if deletion is not an option. (to reduce the garbage in the list)
I have some solutions on my mind to get the job done, but I’m unsure if they’ll work out. (even after spending some time researching the issue on the web)
1: Doing a branch from the old project into the new and then deleting the old project. I think it should keep the history of the the old project has been deleted. Some people over here are very vocal about this not being the case causing some strife. Before pushing this option I’d like to be sure this will work
2: Hijack the migration tool to migrate sources between projects (possibly via via a temporary Team Collection). I have read this could be an option, but the details of how to execute such a move are still unclear to me. It seems this has a lot of caveats attached to it and can be cumbersome to execute. (I’m no superman when it come to these matters, but so is noone else over here)
The Migration guide seems to suggest that this might be possible, but I can’t determine if this scenario is supported, and how to recover if things go wrong.
Maybe it is possible to set up the new projects and hide the old projects from the team collections’ team projects list without deleting them? (I wonder if there is some kind of inactive setting for team projects, I can’t seem to find any such option after exploring the tfsconfig tool of the admin console)
An explanation of how to best apporach this problem and possible solutions would be much appreaciated.
I’m pretty sure if the old team project is deleted, the part of history that is associated with that team project will also be gone, see here for more details. You can confirm this by doing a quick test move if you want.
You can mostly achieve this by denying read access (GenericRead) to most of the users on the old team projects. Of course for the Project Collection Administrators who have this permission by default on all the team projects, the old team projects still appear in the list for them.
Good luck!