Real-world use of Mercurial with a Team Foundation

Question

My shop uses TFS & is generally happy with it with the exception of the lack of local repository commits/reverts. I'm starting to use Mercurial locally myself to help manage smaller chunks of changes, then posting them to TFS. I see that Subversion has a 'bridge' component to automagically enable this if the central VCS is Subversion. I have not found one for Team System. This encourages me that other folks have gone down this path with integrating DVCS with CVCS systems.

(1) Does anyone know of one? I'm sort of doubting it (quick search didn't find anything).

(2) Is anyone using Mercurial/TFS in this manner? If so, can you share your experiences. I'm particularly looking for any insights into what issues might come up that aren't obvious regarding commits to TFS after significant activity via Mercurial.

It seems like a total win-win so far with just me using if for a few days--but I know enough then to think it's just that easy.

Answer 1

@Eric, your post at lostechies was most helpful. With VS2010 I had to add options /diff and /deletes to the tftp online command in the push script to get changed and deleted files to be checked in to TFS. Initially I was getting an error from push when a file has been deleted (from -working) that hg update is
"unable to remove FileXyz : access is denied".
I installed the MakeWritable.py extension but that only works when files are opened not deleted. So I added a call to attrib to remove the READ-ONLY from all files in the project and then restore it afterwards (excluding the .hg folder) I also added the /diff option so that differences are detected by MD5 checksum instead of depending on the READ-ONLY attribute. Seems to be working fine now.

=====FILE: push.ps1=====
$projName = "TicTacToeCMMI"
$tftp = "C:\Program Files\Microsoft Team Foundation Server 2010 Power Tools\TFPT.exe"
$tf = "C:\Program Files\Microsoft Visual Studio 10.0\Common7\ide\tf.exe"

hg push
cd ..\$projName-tfs  
"Syncing -tfs workspace with TFS server"  
&$tftp scorch /noprompt /exclude:.hg',_Resharper*',*.user  
"Making all files in -tfs writable"
attrib -R /S /D *
"Updating -tfs with latest push from Mercurial"
hg update -C -y
attrib +R /S /D *
attrib -R /S /D .hg\*
"Resyncing Mercurial changes with TFS Server"  
&$tftp online /adds /deletes /diff /exclude:'.hgignore,.hg,bin,obj,*.ps1,_Resharper*,*.lnk,*.user,*.suo,*.vspscc'  
"Checkin"  
&$tf checkin  
cd ..\$projName-working  
cmd /c pause  

====FILE: pull.ps1=====
$projName = "TicTacToeCMMI"
$tf = "C:\Program Files\Microsoft Visual Studio 10.0\Common7\ide\tf.exe"
$username = cmd /c set USERNAME
$username = $username.SubString($username.IndexOf("=")+1)

function pull {
    cd ..\$projName-tfs
    &$tf get
    hg commit -A -m "from tfs" --user $username
    cd ..\$projName-working
    hg pull --rebase
}
pull  
cmd /c pause  

I had a bit of a learning curve with PowerShell scripts which I hadn't used before. For others like me the scripts are run with a shortcut like this:

TARGET: C:\WINDOWS\system32\WindowsPowerShell\v1.0\powershell.exe C:\dev\TicTacToeCMMI-working\push.ps1
START IN: C:\dev\TicTacToeCMMI-working

I put push and pull shortcuts on my task bar so push/pull to/from TFS is a single click

Answer 2

If you want to be able to work with a DVCS and TFS, I believe the best way is to install the SVNBridge for TFS, and the use Bazaar, which is, AFAIK the only DVCS that easily integrates with SVN, and since your TFS now looks like a SVN, you magically get Bazaar/TFS integration