Question

I’ve just moved several referenced DLL’s out of a project’s bin folder and into a special Libraries folder in a shared project. Now I get several build errors because VS is trying to copy the DLL’s from the new location to the bin folder.

I can resolve this quite easily by making the DLL’s in the build folder read-write, not the default TFS read-only, but how do I prevent the problem recurring as soon as I check the whole solution in again?

Answer 1

The comment above is accurate– there’s usually not a good reason to check in binaries (at least not in the development branch). There can be valid reasons (such as when your binaries need to be audited against what’s in production). If they don’t need to be there, have a TFS administrator do a TF DESTROY on the items, then be careful not to check them in again.

That being said, if you do need to continue to do this, you’re going to have to do a couple of things.

First of all, you’ll need to “check out” the bin folder when you the source. This will make all of the binaries writable.

However, if you do that, TFS will, by default, place an exclusive lock on all of the binaries. To keep this from happening, you will need to tell TFS to make these files merge-able. You will need to be an administrator in TFS, or have an administrator perform the following steps.

In Visual Studio 2010:

• Connect to TFS
• Under the Team menu, select Team Project Collection Settings
• Under this menu, choose Source Control File Types. This will bring up a dialog.
• In the dialog find Executable Files on the list and click Edit
• In the next dialog, check Enable file merging and multiple check out
• Click OK to close this dialog box, and OK to close the File Types dialog.

Now, more than one user can check out the executables at a time.