One of the issues I have heard most often when I am introducing TFS Version Control to a development team is that of “Checkout does not automatically get latest”. Many teams have come to know this as standard behaviour, especially those from a Sourcesafe background, and despite strong reasoning for changing this behaviour, many teams just want to continue doing things the “old” way. If you simply can’t live without “Get Latest on Checkout” then here are a few options for you.

MSSCCI Provider

The MSSCCI Provider has had the “Get Latest on Checkout” option for a little while now so if you’re using this provider you can easily enable this today.

Visual Studio 2005

There have been a number of solutions proposed to provide a “Get Latest on Checkout” workaround for VS2005 including a macro option but nothing has been quite as easy to use as a new addin from Evgeny Panor. This new addin works by performing a silent GetLatest function when the user requests Checkout. Configuration of the addin is very easy as shown in the following screenshot. Evgeny does point out that it is currently only a beta release so you should be a little cautious before deploying this too widely in your team.

Read more about the addin on Evgeny blog post and download the beta addin here.

Visual Studio “Orcas”

Based on the widespread feedback requesting GetLatest on Checkout, the product team guys have added support for “Get Latest on Checkout” to the Orcas release (See screenshot)

 

Update: Buck Hodges has provided the following extra information.

For the feature in Orcas, we actually modified the server so that there’s only one roundtrip.  It’s all done as part of pending the edit (checking out the file), rather than having to do a get latest followed by a checkout.

Fortunately, in all cases shown above, the Get Latest on Checkout features is provided as a configurable option so you can configure this in a standard way throughout your specific development team.