After upgrading: Updating licensing and enabling async checkout for server workspaces

Buck Hodges

The other day I wrote a post with a summary of links for upgrading team project settings to turn on all of the new features, such as code review, task board, and more.

There are a couple more things I want to point out that you’ll want to tweak after the upgrade.

First is licensing for the feature set.  The default setting is Standard.  You can choose to set the default to Full if all of your users are licensed for Premium, Ultimate, or Test Professional 2012 (see the editions page).  If not, you can add the people or groups who are licensed for full.  Only users with Full access will get the following features.

  • Backlog and Sprint Planning Tools
  • Request and Manage Feedback

Without adding licensing access to the feature set, you will get “TF400409: You do not have licensing rights to access this feature: Backlog and Sprint Planning Tools” (you may see other features listed, depending on what you try access).

From the Welcome Page, click on Administer Team Foundation Server and then click on the Web Access tab.  To change the default, click on Full and then click on “Set as default web access” to make it the default.  The screen shot shows what you’ll see after making the change.  Note that the “Limited” setting is for users who don’t have a CAL and that you want to grant access to see their work items and file new ones (also known as work item only view in the TFS 2010).

licensing

Second, while we have a great local workspaces feature that is new for TFS 2012 and you can easily switch a server workspace to a local workspace, you may want to keep your workspace a server workspace if it is extremely large (about 50,000 files for a spinning disk, higher for SSD).  Internally, our dev workspaces are often 250,000 files or more (getting them trimmed down is an ongoing effort).  We’ve introduced a feature in TFS 2012 where checkouts in VS 2012 are completely asynchronous if you enable the setting on the TFS 2012 server.  That means that there’s never a pause in VS when it checks out a file you are editing – it happens in the background.

As a consequence of turning on this setting, TFS disables exclusive checkout (any existing ones are converted to exclusive checkin locks) and the get latest on checkout feature.  You can find the documentation here.  You’ll also see in this dialog that you can control whether newly created workspaces default to server or local (out of the box, the default is local workspaces, since we believe that’s what the vast majority of folks will want most of the time).

To get to this dialog, choose Team –> Team Project Collection Settings from the main menu in VS, then choose Source Control.

asynccheckout

[UPDATE 6/4/2012]  I’ve included the TF400409 error message.

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