Question

My scenario is pretty straight-forward. I am working on a long assignment locally on my computer, working off of a code branch from TFS. Along comes the boss, and I need to push through a bug fix. Is there any clean way to change contexts? This long assignment has updated a lot of files, and I want to make sure I implement the bugfix from a clean slate.

If I were using Git, I know what to do: create a new branch from main, fix bug, check in, change back to previous branch, but TFS doesn’t really work that way. Any ideas?

Answer 1

If you don’t want to commit the changes you ‘re working on yet, your first step is to shelve them – that’s pretty straightforward.

The next step is to decide where you ‘ll be implementing your urgent request. This depends on

1. How you have set up your branching scheme in source control (see here for a great resource ), &
2. The line where the error was reported

‘Boss’-bugs tend to be reported from Release-Lines, taking this as a given you would have to:

• Identify the latest changeset that corresponds to the version your problem was reported
• Track this changeset to a version in the branch you can work on (I suppose you can’t make changes directly on your release line, right)
• Make a branch & implement the change. Your build-environment should ensure that all tests & checks ensure that your issue is fixed & that no others have emerged.

Your next challenge is how you ‘ll propagate these changes to a new Release – This greatly depends on how you ship software to the customer (Hotfixes? Patches? Service Packs?), as well as the severity of the issue.

After you ‘ve settled everything back to normal, unshelve & continue working on your long-term task.