Offline in VS 2008 (continued)

In a previous post I talked about offline story for TFS and Visual Studio 2008.

And since then, several important additions have come up.

One important note relates to what exactly becomes "offline" - solution you are opening or the whole server. It turns out that the default behavior will label the whole TFS server as being offline, and as a result, when you will open another solution (without first performing "Go online" on the first one), it will be opened offline automatically. To get the whole server back "online", you will have to perform "Go online" on one of the solutions.

And that indirectly may cause a bug that is described in the MSDN forum post - when the solution is opened from Source Control Exlorer and the server is offline, the error message will appear (though I believe the flow described will not be something often used).

The nuances of offline operation are described in Ben Ryan's blog. Additionally, if you are not happy with whole TFS server being labeled offline when single solution is taken offline, Ben also describes the way to change that behavior.

I can only add that I wish Ben Ryan would post more often (less "offline" time for the blog :)- it appears that he has lots of interesting version control stories to tell.