TFS Labels

I've been spending some time reading up on TFS and how branching, labeling and some of the other more advanced features work in an effort to concoct a new code management process for my team. Our current process is nice and simple, but it's a little bit too simple when we're trying to maintain a clean build for test, introduce fixes that require multiple developers or breaking changes, and think about/work on the next version all at the same time.

In a few future posts I'll talk about some of my findings regarding branching (virtually all of them come from the TFS Branching Guidance, which I cannot recommend enough), but I wanted to devote a couple paragraphs to what I have learned about labels in TFS.

Prior to today, whenever I heard "source control label", I thought of it in the most simplistic sense, i.e. the way it was implemented in Visual SourceSafe. Point at a folder, create a label name, and poof - you have a snapshot-in-time of the codebase. If you load up the history for a file, you can clearly see which revisions were labeled and what the label name was.

Labels in TFS do not work this way. The biggest tip-off to this I had was this blog post, but there's no analogy or walkthrough/instruction in there that shows you what he means. I want to provide both of those things here.

The analogy: Applying tags to photos or music. Most modern personal media-organization applications have functionality that lets you "tag" individual items and then view a list of all items that have a specific tag. Windows Live Photo Gallery is a good example:



You can create a new tag at any time and apply it to as many images as you want. You are always free to remove the tag later, individual images can have multiple tags on them, and deleting a tag doesn't delete the tagged images, it just removes that tag from all images that have it. On the main WLPG screen, you can click a tag name in the list of tag names and it will show you only images with that tag applied.

TFS labels use the exact same concept, but with a twist that makes them way more powerful than the tags on your photo album. When you apply a label, you aren't applying it to a file, you are applying it to a version of a file.

Is this a big deal? It depends on whether or not you make use of it. You can definitely continue to use labels in much the same way as you can in VSS, simply tagging a whole tree with a label at a given point in time. You can also get more fancy with them, using them to form collection of specific revisions of files.

Labels come with a big warning though - labels themselves are not version controlled, meaning that there is no way to track or audit the history of activity on a label. Plus, labels don't keep copies of versions in case of a file deletion, so if a file gets deleted, any label that relies on a version of that file is essentially hosed. These reasons are why it makes more sense to branch for major releases instead of labeling them.

Here are a couple good resources on TFS labels:

• Why TFS labels aren't like SourceSafe labels
• Virtues and Pitfalls of the TFS Label
• Also, TFS 2010 has rolled an important feature from the TFS Power Tools into the product: the ability to rollback to a label and have it show up as a pending change type of "rollback." Rollback or Undo a Changeset in TFS 2010 Version Control. The only caveat is that it's only available from the command line.