Team Development with Visual Studio Team Foundation Server

To consume the common shared project from your own team project you have two
options:
• Branching
• Workspace mapping
Branching
Branching is the preferred method for most shared-source scenarios. It enables you to
pull the shared source into your project and check it into your team project’s source
control. In this scenario, you branch the source from the common shared location into
your team project. This creates a configuration that unifies the source from the shared
location and your project on the server-side.
Shared source changes are picked up as part of a merge process between the branches.
This makes the decision to pick up changes in the shared source more explicit and easier
to test, but it also adds some overhead. Additionally, this process makes the use of Team
Build much simpler because the mapping is done on the server side; there is no clientside
mapping that needs to be duplicated on the build server.
For example, if you have two team projects named $TeamProject1 and $Common, and
Common is the shared project source, you create a branch from the shared location to the
project that references it. The TFS folder structure should resemble the one shown in
Figure 6.2.