Make your Team Foundation Source Control Workspace efficient using cloaking

A workspace in Team Foundation Server can be tailored to specific needs. That is the main reason why you can have multiple workspaces on the same machine.

For instance, let’s say that you have a certain set of directories that you regularly want to get the latest version for. These directories are in a hierarchy, but only 20% of the data in the hierarchy needs to be available locally.

For this situation, you can edit your workspace, and define specific folders that should be Cloaked. (See the dialog below).

Cloaking means that the folder won’t be retrieved locally. So this means that I can use the root directory of the hierarchy to do a get-latest of all my folders, without unneeded folder, because they are cloaked.

If you hate using GUI’s, you can achieve the same functionality by using the TF command, using the following commandline:

tf workfold /cloak (Team Foundation source control serverfolder|localfolder) [/workspace: workspacename] [/s:servername]tf workfold /cloak (Team Foundation source control serverfolder|localfolder) [/workspace: workspacename] [/s:servername]

One thing you cannot do however (and which I think is a pity) is to cloak a folder, and then make one of its children or folders below that active. This means that when you want to have only one child folder, you cannot cloak the parent and uncloak the child, but have to cloak all the siblings of the one folder you do want to have…