Grant Holliday

SvnBridge allows you to use the awesome TortoiseSVN windows explorer subversion client with Team Foundation Server. The bridge mimics the behaviour of a Subversion server and translates the Subversion commands into TFS commands. When I first heard about the SvnBridge project sometime last year, I’ll admit that I privately snubbed it a little because it didn’t feel right and a little hackish.

However, after reading Ayende/Oren (of RhinoMocks fame)’s blog posts on the work he’s been doing on it lately I figured it was time to give it another look.

Scott Hanselman gives a good overview on getting started with the bridge

These changes are not in the 1.0 release from October 2007, but if you download the latest source code and build it yourself (run “Build.cmd Build”) you’ll see some of the great new features:

• Significant performance optimisations
• Connect to multiple TFS servers with one bridge

When you start the SvnBridge.exe you have a new option:

I’m using a copy of the new Visual Studio & Team Foundation Server all-in-one evaluation VPC which has some sample projects in it.

If you’re using TortoiseSVN to checkout the latest code of $/TicTacToe from http://tfsrtm08:8080 then you just specify the repository URL as: http://localhost:8081/tfsrtm08:8080/TicTacToe

You’ll get prompted for authentication if integrated authentication doesn’t work.

The standard TortoiseSVN Checkout dialog:

And now you have TFS Source Control within Windows Explorer. No more read-only files and as soon as you change a file, it’s icon changes.

Associating check-ins with Work Items

My first concern with using the bridge was how to associate check-ins with work items, as this is a vitally important step to link code back to tasks/requirements.

Fortunately it looks like you can add a line to the bottom of your check-in/commit comment “work item: 1234″ or “work items: 1234, 4567″ and it will add the appropriate linkages.

This is what the changeset looks like when viewed in TFS:

But it looks to be broken for the moment, I’ll file a bug for that one

Unfortunately check-in policies are not supported, so you’ll have to make sure that you enforce them as part of your build process.

I encourage you to download it and have a play with it, you may find a perfect situation to use it in. I think this could be the way to bring version control to the non-developer TFS users out there. Remember though, you still need Client Access Licenses (CALs) for all users accessing your TFS server.