Checking into TFS best practices

Hi,

I'm trying to figure out the best way to checkin nopCommerce source into TFS so that all my developers can work on the project.

I tried checking in from the Solution, but it missed a lot of required files.

I tried checking in the entire folder from source control explorer, but still there were files excluded.

Is the solution to checkin the entire folder, not allowing VS to exclude ANY files? Anybody have experience with this, or have best practices recommendation for nopCommerce?

Thanks.

I tried checking in the entire folder into TFS, but then every time I try to build, it says it can't move certain DLL's due to access denied.

TFS sets files as read only when they are checked in, if I checked out the entire solution then I could build again; but not sure if that's a good way to go about it.

Is the recommended route to use Mercurial instead? I see we can clone the nop repo, and that way get access to code updates too, is there documentation somewhere about going that route...

I've always only used DVSC (git, mercurial), but probably the best practices still apply.

You should configure your SCM to ignore the result of builds (dll and assembly symbols), configuration files per-machine (like settings.txt and installedplugins.txt) and every user-specific settings files of visual studio (.suo ecc).

Probably all you have to do is translate the nopcommerce .hgignore (link below) into the equivalent in TFS.

Make sure you have the latest nuget installed.

.hgignore: http://nopcommerce.codeplex.com/SourceControl/changeset/view/683919245489#.hgignore

EDIT: yeah, probably switching to mercurial is the easiest way to go.
For example, my setup for working on nopcommerce (to apply client-specific modifications where i cannot rely solely on plugins) is to have the codeplex mercurial repo cloned and branch out to implement what i have to implement, this way i can easily (more or less) chose between changesets to start with and merge/update if needed.

I use TFS with no issues. Actually you do not want all files checked in. Just check in the solution and you should be set. The /bin and /Administration in Nop.Web for example are never checked in. The files in Nop.Admin are checked in along with your Plugins project etc. The other files that you say are missing are built (created) with you build the solution. Also, if anyone wants to play you can still setup a remote TFS free at this time at https://tfspreview.com/

Thanks for both your answers. I'm gonna try getting TFS to work for my team per your recommendations. At some point I do know need to learn more about mercurial.

Yup, we're using tfspreview.