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Comparing SourceSafe Labels to Team Foundation Server Labels

A colleague recently asked me how to find labels in Team System. I never used
labels much, even in the bad old days of SourceSafe, so I did some exploring. What's a
label?

A label is a marker that you can attach selectively to a set of
otherwise unrelated files and folders in your source control server to
facilitate their collective retrieval to a workspace for either development or
build purposes.

To add a
label, right click a file or folder in Team Explorer and choose the Apply
Label command. That results in the following dialog:

Once you've applied the label, it's hard to find them again in the UI. Try
File, Source Control, Label, Find Label:

If you're used to the Visual SourceSafe label model, you may be in for a
shock-- Team System labels are very different animals. Brian Harry elaborates:

The difference with SourceSafe is that [labels] are not
included in the history. There’s a good reason for this. Labels in
SourceSafe were always “point in time” labels. You generally labeled some
tree at some point in time and that implied a label of all of the contents of
the tree at the same point in time. In this respect it is reasonable to
display labels in time sequence with history. Everything before it in the list
is in the label and everything after it is not. This works for a significant
percentage of label uses (and is a convenient way to think of them) but not
all.

In Team Foundation, labels are more powerful. Instead of being a single
point in time, they are able to have versions of each file in the label from
different points in time. The canonical scenario is that you label a build and
then find some bugs and want to go back change the versions of a few of the
files (either omitting changes that introduced bugs or adding changes that
fixed bugs). Now the label does not represent a point in time, but rather a
collection of points in time. This makes it very hard to display it in a list
mixed with change sets because there is not “correct” ordering of the list. As
a result, [in Team Foundation Server] we treat the list of changesets and the
list of labels separately.

In other words, Team System labels represent a specific set of files at a
specific version-- but nothing else.

posted on Wednesday, May 03, 2006 4:41 PM by jatwood

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Comment ::

Comments

#
re: Comparing SourceSafe Labels to Team Foundation Server Labels

Thanks... keep up the blog

Thursday, May 04, 2006
7:39 AM by stephen patten

#
VSTS Links - 05/04/2006

Rob Caron tells us the localized Team Foundation Server
versions have shipped. He also posts about the...

Thursday, May 04, 2006
7:47 AM by Team System News

#
re: Comparing SourceSafe Labels to Team Foundation Server Labels

Nice information about Labels in VSTS.

Tuesday, May 16, 2006
11:22 PM by Kans Parmar

#
Martin Woodwards Top 10 Tips for Team Foundation Server

Martin gives us some excellent advice on what to avoid
and what to do to make our Team Foundation Server life eaier!

Friday, June 02, 2006
11:18 AM by Team Foundation Server

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