TFS Branching

The key goal of branching is to provide isolation between parallel streams of work. Branching enables parallel development by providing each development activity a self-contained snapshot of needed sources, tools, external dependencies and process automation. Having more branches increases complexity and merge costs.

You can have different kinds of branches like Dev, Stable, Release, Feature and etc. We can add permissions to each branch. We have to merge the changes from child to parent branch and vise versa.
You can refer Branching and Merging Guide for more details about these new features in TFS.

In this post I'll explain how to do a Basic Branch Plan using Team Foundation Service.

Below is the structure of Basic Branching of source code.

You need to install TfsBranchToolVSExtension.vsix. To do that download the source code from codeplex. Rebuild the TfsBranchToolVSExtension using Visual Studio 2012. You must have installed,

• TFS 2012 Object Model (OM) 
• Visual Studio 2012 SDK

After build the project go to bin folder and install the TfsBranchToolVSExtension.vsix file into Visual Studio 2012.
Go to a project collection in Source Control Explorer. There will be only your solution folder and the build process templates. For this demo I have created my project collection in  Team Foundation Service.

Apply initial branching structure like below.

In the dialog you can select Basic, Feature or MainOnly branching structures. But if you want more branching types you have to do appropriate changes for the downloaded codeplex project. For this demo, select Basic Branch plan and apply it.

After the branch plan has applied, new branches(Dev and Main) will be added like below.

For more details about Branching Plans, go through the Branching and Merging Guide.