Team Development with Visual Studio Team Foundation Server

The VersionControl.config file maps the name of the workspace to a local directory on
your computer. It does not hold the mapping between individual source control folders
and your local directories. That information is held on the server in several tables
(including tbl_Workspace and tbl_workingfolder) in the TfsVersionControl database.
Cloaking
You can use cloaking as a performance optimization when you want to prevent a part of
the source control tree from being retrieved. The following are typical scenarios for using
cloaking:
• You want to build the project locally and a folder is not needed for the build, for
example a documentation folder.
• You are part of a large team project and you only want to retrieve part of the
project.
For either of the above scenarios you can cloak folders to stop the client retrieving those
folders. You cloak folders on the client by editing the workspace and changing the status
of the working folder from active to cloak.
Keep the following recommendations in mind when you cloak:
• Do not cloak individual files. This is likely lead to maintenance problems later in
the project.
• For a large project, map out the root folder and cloak sub folders rather than
creating multiple workspaces for the project.
What Files Should Be Version Controlled?
The following list identifies the key file types that you should add to source control.
These are the file types that are added when you click Add Solution to Source Control.
• Solution files (*.sln). Solution files maintain a list of constituent projects,
dependencies information, build configuration details, and source control provider
details.
• Project files (*.csproj or *.vbproj). Project files include assembly build settings,
referenced assemblies (by name and path), and a file inventory.
• Visual Studio Source Control Project Metadata (*.vspscc). These files maintain
project bindings, exclusion lists, source control provider names and other source
control metadata.
• Application configuration files (*.config). Extensible Markup Language (XML)
configuration files contain project and application specific details used to control your
application’s run-time behavior. Web applications use files named Web.config. Non-
Web applications use files named App.config.