Read-Write Local Trees in TFS

One rather annoying feature of TFS is that all files are marked read-only in your local tree until you checkout a file, at which point it becomes read-write. Its not hard to find other people who also find this very annoying.

I was hopeful MS would make read-write local trees an option in the Orcas release of TFS, but recently came across this post by Buck Hodges where he explains it won't be a feature in Orcas.

I was annoyed enough to add support for read-write files in version 0.5.0 of tf4mono.
To enable it just type

tf config File.ReadWrite true

Then from that point on tf get, tf undo, tf checkin, tf add and friends will do the right thing.

If you know what you're doing you can compile and run the tf4mono client on Windows, either against the MS TFS assemblies or with the tf4mono implementation of these assemblies.

I didn't want to lose this flexibility but to really do this right API level support would be required. Subsequently, I ended up teaching the tf4mono TFS assemblies to read the TF client XML config file. This is slightly distasteful but the standard assemblies already read the workspace cache XML file so I can live with it. I really didn't want to bolt this read-write stuff on top of the existing code, because that would have meant alot more stat's and chmod's under the hood.

Anyway to really make this work I also had to beef up the tf online command, but that will have to wait for another blog post.