Reputation: 73
We have 3 environments: dev, test, and staging.
I want to check in and out of TFS. When we make changes, I want to promote the code to the dev web server. Next I want to promote the changes to test, then to staging. Would it be possible to do this with Team Foundation Server?
Upvotes: 2
Views: 878
Reputation: 23613
You can manually checkout the code from each branch, make your changes subsequently to each branch, and checkin. Very carefully.
Much better is to have these 3 environments be branches of each other. (Typically you start with dev, and branch to the other 2 in turn). Then you can use the Merge functionality to merge (for example) your dev changesets directly to test, etc. At this point your Test modules (that need to be changed to match dev) are checked out, with the changes. Then simply commit the changes. Then repeat for staging and rinse. This is the suggested methodology for this common scenerio.
Two important notes:
Building is a separate action. You need to set up a separate build for each situation, though of course once you set up the first one the other two will be trivial. After your merge to staging, you'll then run the staging build. (From Team Explorer or in the Build menu). TFS is a bit heavy but once it is set up it does handle this situation very well, easy for a distributed team to merge and build quickly (with automated build tests, etc.).
Upvotes: 3
Reputation: 12092
Why on earth are people suggesting branching? You branch for different features or static branches for release snapshots.
Surely the differences between these environments are configuration items/files and settings within these. All you need to do is get your deployment and release management process in order.
Create appropriate MSBuild tasks and use TFSBuild (Continuous Integration) to call these to take care of outputting the correct config files for the Environment/Configuration you are building. You can trivially add another MSBuild target that deals with the appropriate deployment to the respective target environments.
Upvotes: 4
Reputation: 4716
Yes, this is possible, but you must manually check them in from one branch to another.
Upvotes: 0