TFS as a local repository for Visual Studio Online

0
votes

We just started test-running VSO for source control/Scrum management on a new project. We currently use TFS running in-house for other projects. I love the VSO scrum tools, but, with today's VSO outage, we are questioning whether VSO is practical for us as a source control.
After researching this afternoon, I don't see a solution to have a local backup of VSO. My current thought is to use a local git repo that pushes to VSO. The problem with that is switching technologies is not an easy sell, especially when we already have the local TFS to maintain.

We have thought of using VSO to manage scrum tasks and keep source control in-house, but I really don't like having the two separated (can't link commits and I think that everything should be in one place if possible).

Yes, for you purists out there, we do have a big whiteboard with index cards and stickies for our sprint tasks, but we're still looking at the cloud as another option ;)

To condense my rambling into a real question: Is there a way to use in-house TFS as a local repo that pushes to VSO, or to at least have it mirror VSO?

1
tfsazure-devops

1 Answers

2
votes

Are you concerned with VSO losing your source (extremely unlikely), or just experiencing the occasional outage and not being able to check in or get latest for a time?

Using git for source control would be the simplest approach, as you've stated. You'll have the full repository on your development machine and can make whatever commits you like. Changing source control would mean upskilling the team on git, creating a new team project and using git-tfs or git-tf to migrate the history, so I understand why you might not want to change.

With TFVC, if you are using a local workspace you should still be able to work during an outage and make changes. You just won't be able to check in. If VSO has an outage it'll be an inconvenience but shouldn't stop you working.

In terms of using TFS as a mirror that pushes automatically to VSO, the simple answer is "No, you can't do that".

If you used git, you could set you local repository to have two remotes, one being the local TFS server and the other being VSO, but it would still be up to you to push/pull the changes manually between both servers yourself to keep them aligned.