The Teamprise Explorer Client is a stand-alone application designed to resemble Microsoft's Team Explorer. This client can be used access Team Foundation Server from outside the Visual Studio environment, including non-Windows operating systems.
The Teamprise Plug-in for Eclipse is used to integrate source code control with Team Foundation Server inside an Eclipse-based IDE.
The Teamprise Command-Line Client is primarily used for build procedures and other automated scripts, but can also be used for routine development. Additionally, the command-line client allows for access to TFS on platforms that do not support the Eclipse Rich Client Platform, which is required by Teamprise Explorer and the plug-in for Eclipse.
The Teamprise Plug-in for Eclipse is compatible with IDEs based on Eclipse 3.0 and higher. Many development products are built on the Eclipse platform, and the Teamprise Plug-in for Eclipse is intended to be a fully-compatible plug-in to these products, as well as the base Eclipse IDE.
For a listing of tested IDEs, please see the Compatibility with Eclipse-based Integrated Development Environments section of our website.
No. There are several Eclipse-based IDEs that are not specific to Java only development.
“Workspace” can refer to either an Eclipse workspace or a TFS workspace.
Every running instance of Eclipse is associated with an Eclipse workspace. This Eclipse workspace serves as a logical container of projects that are available in that Eclipse instance. The Eclipse workspace also has a workspace directory, which is a local directory on the computer that Eclipse is running on. When Eclipse is first launched, the user is prompted to choose this directory; it is also possible to pass the directory as an argument when launching Eclipse to avoid the prompt. The Eclipse workspace directory is also known as the instance location.
A TFS workspace is a collection of data on a Team Foundation Server that is used to manage interactions between a user and the version control portion of TFS. A TFS workspace contains data such as working folder mappings, local version information, pending changes and conflict status.
The Teamprise Workspaces FAQ lists additional details in regards to both types of workspaces.
Verifying that the information was submitted correctly for the login credentials is a good place to start. TFS uses your Windows account (username and password) and Windows domain (active directory) to authenticate. Something else to consider is that passwords are case sensitive.
The connection URL can be entered in the wrong format or the TFS port has been left off. There is an example copied below:
http://servername.com:8080
A firewall or proxy server could be obstructing the connection to your Team Foundation Server.
For additional suggestions, please see the Diagnosing Common Connection Problems knowledge base article.
Teamprise Product Activation is a one-time operation that associates a set of TFS credentials with a license key for a given computer. Activation is required the first time TFS is accessed via a Teamprise Client by each user on each computer – a user will be required to activate multiple times if multiple machines or user accounts are used. Multiple activations for these scenarios does not consume and additional Teamprise license key.
Auto activation is the primary means for activation, but requires Internet access at the time of the activation attempt. If access is blocked, contact us and a Teamprise agent will manually activate the license key for you.
If you are interested in becoming an administrator for your Teamprise License keys, please contact us and we will provide you with administrator login information. The administration interface allows an administrator to monitor license key usage and provides the ability to deactivate users as needed, thus freeing their license for use by a different individual.
When Teamprise connects to a Team Foundation Server for the first time, it must download a large amount of metadata that supports the work item tracking tool. On subsequent connections, this metadata is updated incrementally; these incremental updates are normally much smaller than the initial download. The size of the initial download varies depending on your TFS setup. In general, it grows linearly with the number of team projects you create on your server. The memory needed by the client is proportional to the size of this metadata download. When this error occurs, the initial metadata download is exhausting the default maximum heap size of Teamprise Explorer. The easiest solution to this problem is to run Teamprise Explorer with a larger max heap size for the initial connection to the TF server. After the initial connection succeeds, the default maximum heap size may be restored.
To increase the maximum heap size of Teamprise Explorer, you can specify the following arguments when launching it:
TeampriseExplorer -vmargs -Xmx1024M
Most likely, the amount of memory available to Eclipse is insufficient. A minimum of 512 MB is a recommended to start, but if the client continues to hang, increase it to 1024 MB. If assistance is needed increasing your memory, please see our article Increasing the Memory Available to Eclipse. After the initial connection succeeds, the default amount of memory for Eclipse may be restored.
When the Teamprise Plug-in for Eclipse is installed, the Eclipse IDE automatically detects new resources in projects and the Teamprise Plug-in will add these resources to its pending changes. Normally resources that are "derived" from another resource (build process output files, for example) are not sent to the Teamprise Plug-in, but some build configurations (those that perform external build steps, for example) create resources that Eclipse does not treat as derived. In order to prevent these resources from becoming pending additions to the source control repository, the Teamprise Plug-in for Eclipse (2.0 and later) consults two sets of filters to determine which resources should never be automatically added.
Eclipse 3.0 and later provides an Ignored Resources preference page under the Team preference category. This page contains a list of wildcards that apply to detected resources, and any matching resources are not added to the pending changes.
The Teamprise Plug-in for Eclipse also looks for a file named .tpignore at the root of Eclipse projects. This file is consulted each time Eclipse informs the Teamprise Plug-in about a new resource, and if the resource matches any of the patterns in the file, the resource is not added to the pending changes. If the resource does not match any of the patterns, it is added normally to the pending changes.
For instructions on how to configure either one of these options, please see the Filtering Automatically Added Eclipse Project Resources.
Not currently. The ability to create new Team Projects outside of Visual Studio is not supported by Microsoft at this time. When this option becomes available, we plan to add the feature.