How To Get Started With Team Foundation Server (TFS)?

Hello. Running Toad For Oracle (13.1.0.78) on Windows alongside Visual Studio Enterprise 2015. My team would like to configure Team Foundation Server to work with Toad. How do I do that?

What I see so far is "consult the Toad help file", which directs me to a nonexistent View->Options->Source Control settings menu. From poking around on my own I see that under Team Coding->Team Coding Manager, there is a window that contains one working icon, that lets me select TFS as a "VCS Provider". However, selecting that gives me a message saying "Team Foundation Server host is not set". That's not surprising since I haven't actually set up TFS on this machine. But once someone in my network has done so, what steps do I need to take to point Toad to TFS? Thanks for any pointers.

Hi Kris,

I'm not entirely sure what directed you to View -> Options -> Source Control settings, but that sounds like it was referencing a much older version of Toad. There are a few documents which can help you configure things with Team Coding:

  1. If you go to Team Coding -> Configure from the main menu, Toad will open up the Team Coding configuration window. You can click on the "View Team Coding Getting Started Guide" button in the toolbar to open a step-by-step guide about configuring Team Coding and setting up a team project. This guide is also available in the "docs" sub-folder of Toad's installation folder. This guide, however, doesn't dive into detail about specific VCS provider settings. However, it is a great place to start to setting up Team Coding for the first time.

  2. You can reference John Pocknell's video here: https://www.quest.com/video/setting-up-team-coding-with-vcs-integration8121746/ . In this video, John walks through configuring Team Coding with a VCS provider. In his case, he's using Subversion. In Team Foundation Server's case, the login window is replaced with a Workspace configuration window, but otherwise the general steps should be similar.

  3. You can find more information about configuring specific Team Foundation Server settings by opening the help file, clicking on the Search tab, and typing "Team Foundation Server" in the box. There's a page called "Microsoft Team Foundation Server Configuration Options" which should provide information about the various TFS settings options that are listed in the TFS Configuration Options window.

For Team Foundation Server, you'll want to click on the ellipsis button next to the VCS Provider drop-down after you have selected "Team Foundation Server" from the drop-down list. There you can set the host name of the Team Foundation Server you plan to use. If your system administrator installed a fairly vanilla installation of Team Foundation Server, the host name should be the only setting you'll need to set; but there are other options in that window that will let you customize as needed to connect to your TFS server.

Upon first connecting to TFS, it will prompt you to create a TFS Workspace. This is a mapping between a project on the TFS server and its corresponding local work folder for you on your machine. You'll need to create that mapping in order for TFS to know where files should be placed.

If you have any other questions during this process, please feel free to ask and I'll help wherever I can.

Thanks,

-John

Thanks; it sounds like we're on the right track then. A team member says he's doing roughly what you said.

FYI, what directed me to the nonexistent "View->Options->Source Control" menu was the help menu for Toad, when I typed in "Team Foundation Server" in the Index box. This took me to a help page with that info. Maybe such a menu appears after TFS is actually configured, since the specific page says "TFS Work Items".

Hi Kris,

Thanks for letting us know about that. It looks like that help file page needs to be updated to match the current menu location, which is "Team Coding -> Configuration". We'll see if we can get that updated.

Thanks again, and let us know if you have any more questions as you get TFS configured!

-John