Wednesday, October 11, 2006

Renaming Team Project

When you create new Team project, give some serious consideration to its name. The Team project cannot be renamed in TFS v1 (No comment about it - you may find some opinions in MSDN usergroups).

The rename operation seems so obvious to the folks that I thought it is worth to post about it. You may well imagine with what incredulity the absense of the feature is met when need to rename project arises (there you have some really colorful language :).

If you already named your project and looking at ways to rename it, you may use the following workaround (sort of workaround, because you won't really end up with renamed project with identical contents):
1) Create new project with desired name
2) Copy work items from old project to a new one (one-by-one, as there is no bulk copy option).
3) Move all source control folders from under old project folder to a new project folder
4) Sharepoint portal documents cannot be moved in bulk (as far as I know), so you do that manually
Move of source code will retain the files history, and work items will also have partial history, but overall I would say the workaround does not worth the labour (and Sharepoint docs will not have their history). At any rate, selecting right name in the beginning beats any workaround by far.

So be circumspect when you name your Team project!

Update: I stand corrected, as there exist freeware utility for moving work items between Team Projects (written by Eric Lee); see posts here and here.

1 comment:

Anonymous said...

You're wrong about bulk-copy of work items, however. There's a utility over on CodePlex (not 100% if its here or off his blog), run by one of the TFS devs.

John St. Clair