Team System Integration

Yousef -

Support for Team Foundation Server (TFS) and Visual Source Safe (VSS) will be included in K2 blackpearl 0807, scheduled to be released in September.

For exact details on release date, contact your sales representative, and/or watch the K2 web site.

Copy+Paste from previous discussion:

We’ve used MS SS, MS TFS and SG Vualt over a bunch of projects. They all suffer the same issues. The major pain we have include:

1.       K2 checking out the project file when opening a workflow or when doing a build

2.       K2 checking out the process file when opening or just viewing and saving without having any changes to be saved (developers are paranoid so they always have the left hand on Ctrl + S)

3.       TFS insisting on monitoring file system changes and adding them to the source server automatically (i.e. extender projects)

The biggest problem is K2 wanting to check the project file out. Its compounded by the fact that merging a project, process or smartobject file is not recommended - so we have a rule of doing exclusive check-outs on any K2 bits. This does result in the fact that whoever’s working on the workflow blocks anybody else from doing anything. Ways around this is to create one process per project only but you can end up having 10 projects for 10 workflows.

Another tip is to not include a workflow project in the rest of your solution. We always have a dedicated solution that contains all the projects for our solution except workflow and have a second project that only contains the workflow projects. This is because doing a build takes by a factor or magnatide longer when processes or smartobjects are included in the build.

 In my experience, we allow the system (TFS) to check out the project and solution files whenever it wants, however, we never check them in unless we have added a new process or smart object.  All those miscellaneous changes it makes to those files during normal operation don’t seem to need to be retained.  We’ve gotten in the habit of exclusively checking out files that we know we are changing, and doing the simple check out on files that K2 ‘thinks’ are changing but we won’t be checking in.  Then, at check-in time, we check in exclusively checked out files and undo changes to non-exclusive check outs.