BHAL Project Home Page / QuickStart Guide / Configuring Team Explorer

Configuring Team Explorer

This page is a guide to help you configure Team Explorer.

Team Explorer is the tool you need if you plan on connecting to any Team Foundation Server, including CodePlex. But since many people can´t afford TFS, Microsoft has provided that we, who develop open-source code, have access to Team Explorer nonetheless. I can´t possibly say better than Rob Caron, so read his words of wisdom.

Anyway, you can download Team Explorer from here (just right-click and click "Save Target As"). It comes as a DVD-image and you can use any virtual mounting software to mount it or burn it if you will.

Well, I trust you will find it´s instalation pretty easy, so I´ll skip to it´s configuration.

For starters you will need the configuration data for the Team Foundation Server you will be using. For example if you are using codeplex for BHAL:

Team Foundation Server Name: tfs01.codeplex.com

Port Number: 443

Protocol: https

Username: Your codeplex username

Password: Your codeplex password

First, locate the Team Explorer tab (right beside the Solution Explorer Tab as shown in the picture below). If you can´t find it just click on the View/Team Explorer menu item, or if you are (like me) a keyboard freak, type CTRL+W,M.

Now that you have it open it´s time to configure it.

Click on the Add Existing Team Project Icon, as shown in the image below:

The "Connect to Team Foundation Server" dialog will be shown as indicated below:

In this dialog you can add new Team Servers by clicking the Servers button, or if there are already added server, you can choose one of them to add a Team Project to your list of Team Projects.

Let´s click in the Servers button since we must add the CodePlex server. The following dialog will be shown:

You will click "Add" and then you will be prompted for the Team Foundation Server information. We´ll fill the information on the CodePlex server and hit Ok.

At this point you will be prompted for your credentials as shown below:

After providing the credentials, your servers dialog should have a CodePlex entry as shown in this screen:

The Team Project List will be shown with some Team Projects on it. Only the team projects you are a member of will be shown. Since I´m coordinator of the BHAL project and member of the TFS Source Code Version Tree Browser project, both are shown to me when I select the CodePlex server in the dropdown.

I then choose both (you can alternatively click thet Select All checkbox) and click ok.

My team explorer section of Visual Studio look a lot different now as you can see here:

All the projects I added are now shown in the Team Explorer and I can see the following items on both:

• Work Items
• Documents (Not currently supported on CodePlex)
• Reports (Not currently supported on CodePlex)
• Team Builds

And the one we´ll probaly be using the most, Source Control.

Now, we click on Source Control on any of the projects. The following screen should follow:

Notice the Workspace toolbox Item that has a dropdown that says: "Bernardo2". The concept of workspaces is beyond this guide, but I´m sure you can find out all about it on the web. Martin Woodward (as always!) has a great explanation on the concept of Check-out and Workspaces here. There´s also a Microsoft Developer’s Guide to Team Foundation Version Control in the format of a Powerpoint File.

Personally, I´d rather configure just my $/ source control folder and let the rest of the tree have the same structure as the Source Control Tree. So I proceed to do it. I click in the "Workspaces" item in the workspaces dropdown and the following dialog appears:

You can see that the server knows about both my machines, but in the dropdown in the toolbox, only the workspaces that I can use in the machine I´m currently on are listed.

So I proceed and click edit on the "Bernardo2" workspace. The dialog that allow me to edit the workspace is shown as below:

I then create a c:\Development\CodePlex\ folder that will serve as the local folder for the $\ node of the Source Control tree. Visual Studio than notifies me that my workspace has changed and as such I should perform a Get operation in order to update the server on the changes of my workspace.

And that´s exactly what I´m going to do now. I right-click the $ node ("https://tfs01.codeplex.com:443") and choose Get Latest Version. The server then downloads all the source control items to my local folder as I specified.