It has been a pretty exciting week for TFS Now. First we got lots of link love from bloggers around the world (thanks guys), then, we received a number of sign-up requests for the service.

Since people are adopting the service it is probably a good time to talk about source code migration strategies as they apply to TFS Now (and TFS generally). Andrew Matthews started a thread on our internal mailing list so that we could discuss it:

“We have the XYZ repository now. It’s flaky as hell. How can we extract all of our history out of it into TFS Now, and how long will it take?”

The quick answer is that out of the box Microsoft ships a converter that allows you to migrate from your existing Visual SourceSafe database. In order to get this working with TFS Now you will probably need to build a workstation and join it to your dedicated TFS Now domain. This will avoid any potential authentication issues.

If you need to convert from other version control systems I am interested in hearing from you. There are various options available ranging from possibly setting up CS-Coverter from ComponentSoftware Inc., or even writing custom tools for the TFS Migration and Synchronization Toolkit.

One of the things you will notice when you migrate the code is that the changes are applied from the time you do the migration. So it won’t put the dates from the source repository in the destination repository (other than for reference purposes in the comments).

Right now I am not sure how it will take to do it across the Internet, but before you start you might want to drop us a line so that we can take a check point on your installation and suspend maintenance activities during the migration.

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