Branch structure in Developer Division at Microsoft

re: Branch structure in Developer Division at Microsoft

Ian Dunross — Sun, 13 Nov 2005 07:52:11 GMT

If that was meant for public consumption. It was a waste of time. If it was your internal documentation may be it was a good attempt.

May be a small step by step example would be good for mere mortals of the world.

re: Branch structure in Developer Division at Microsoft

Keeron — Sun, 13 Nov 2005 08:19:18 GMT

Excellent start :) I've been curious about the branching structure and mainly the VBLs. Larry Osterman had few blog posts about the build labs (in relation to his audio feature in Vista), but never went in such details.

Please do post more on this - as Ian mentioned, examples would be great. Maybe even take a known enough feature and walk us through the various branches.

How does CTP releases come into play here? What about integration issues (.net was a critical part of both VS and SQL server).
Do developers often (or seldom?) work on priviate branches or they usually work on this VBLs?

re: Branch structure in Developer Division at Microsoft

TAG — Sun, 13 Nov 2005 08:43:22 GMT

Ian Dunross,

Microsoft has no any internal documentation. This is one of reasons why they hire Technical Writer's

re: Branch structure in Developer Division at Microsoft

bharry — Sun, 13 Nov 2005 19:05:14 GMT

Sorry it was so incomprehensible. Hopefully my follow up is better. If not just let me know.

Of course we have internal documentation on tons of things. In fact there's quite a lot of internal docs on the VBLs and how to use them. Unfortunately that's has no bearing on whether or not I'm a good writer :)

Brian

re: Branch structure in Developer Division at Microsoft

Keith Hill — Tue, 15 Nov 2005 01:06:36 GMT

Very interesting IMO. Your switching to feature branches is similar to an approach we used to take on a product where we didn't have branching available in our SCM tool. It was primarily C based and we used #if WANT_SOME_FEATURE preprocessor directives extensively in code to "firewall" features until they were ready to be turned on for everybody. It was a bit of a hassle to go back in after the release and clear out the firewalls but for a team of 8 people it worked pretty darn well. And yes, there were features that we "turned off" shortly before shipping due to major bugs cropping up.

re: Branch structure in Developer Division at Microsoft

Keith Hill — Wed, 30 Nov 2005 21:47:26 GMT

Can you elaborate on this statement? "We never RI from the release branch back into main.". Thanks.

re: Branch structure in Developer Division at Microsoft

bharry — Fri, 02 Dec 2005 05:25:37 GMT

Sure when the development gets to the point where it is time to do a release - a beta or an RTM we create a "release branch".

At that point the "main" tree opens up for continued work for then next release. The release branch is just used for critical bug fixes that block the release.

We require that, when a developer has an approved fix for the release branch, he/she separately check it in to the main branch and the release branch. The reason for this is that the fix for the release branch is frequently different than the fix for the main branch. This happens for a couple of reasons:

1) Active development in the main branch has caused the code to diverge enough that the fix needs to be different.

2) We must choose a fix with the absolute least chance of introducing a new bug in the release branch where as we can take more risk in the main branch. As a result, frequently the fixes in the release branch are "short term" fixes and the main branch gets the proper long term fix.

re: Branch structure in Developer Division at Microsoft

Keith Hill — Sun, 04 Dec 2005 23:47:26 GMT

Thanks for the explanation. Makes sense.

re: Branch structure in Developer Division at Microsoft

Brent Clark — Wed, 07 Dec 2005 01:21:16 GMT

We've got around 35 developers, and have been using a similar system for the last 3 years. It's been a real savior. It's interesting to hear of others doing the same sort of thing. Our implementation is based on VSS, where we make copies of the whole VSS database for a VBL - branching within VSS takes around 40 hours, which is far too long - hanging out for VSTS to be approved for implementation.
It would be good to see a diagram of how you've fit things together.

bharry's WebLog : Branch structure in Developer Division at Microsoft

Bat's Blog — Thu, 09 Feb 2006 08:31:12 GMT

Quickie: bharry on VBLs and branching

Stuart Celarier — Sat, 22 Apr 2006 16:36:14 GMT

A couple of posts by Brian Harry (bharry) from November 2005 about virtual build labs and branching on the TFS project...

Branch Structures at Microsoft

Community Blogs — Sun, 16 Jul 2006 18:01:05 GMT

I love it when the crew from Microsoft post up details about their internal processes. This time its

Brian Harry: “Branch structure in Developer Division at Microsoft” — Version Control Blog — branching and merging, Use cases,

Sun, 24 Dec 2006 02:42:13 GMT

PingBack from http://versioncontrolblog.com/2006/12/24/brian-harry-branch-structure-in-developer-division-at-microsoft/

re: Branch structure in Developer Division at Microsoft

Sat, 06 Jan 2007 20:43:17 GMT

How are the rollbacks occur once released to main?

re: Branch structure in Developer Division at Microsoft

bharry — Mon, 08 Jan 2007 16:22:13 GMT

The truth is that they don't happen too often. Mostly we have a "keep moving forward" mentality - which means we fix the problem in Main rather than roll the changes back. That said, we do it occasionally if the problem is too hard to identify or too involved to fix. We use the "tfpt rollback" command in the Team Foundation Power Toys. You can find a link of the Team Foundation Server developer center under http://msdn.microsoft.com

Brian

Microsoft SCM 的策略 -- from BHarry

Refines.Info["Polo Lee"] — Sat, 20 Jan 2007 18:52:38 GMT

bharry's WebLog : A Branching and Merging Primer Branch structure in Developer Division at Microsoft

Copyright Revewals » Team Foundation Server Branching Guidance John Jacob Mario Rodriguez …

Fri, 04 Apr 2008 18:36:27 GMT

PingBack from http://copyrightrenewalsblog.info/team-foundation-server-branching-guidance-john-jacob-mario-rodriguez/

re: Branch structure in Developer Division at Microsoft

TD — Tue, 06 May 2008 18:41:08 GMT

Hi,

At the moment I am working with the TFS and creating the branches on new team projects, rather then on folders on the same team project.

At the moment I do not have problems with that and I find it very usable.

Is there any best practice or disadvantages to this solution?