Source Control from Visual Studio is still terrible!
Sourcesafe used to just about work as long as you used it in the Sourcesafe interface. Trying to use Sourcesafe from inside Visual Studio was fraught and it still is. TFS, VSTS, TFVC, whatever you want to call them are basically still Sourcesafe, you can see by the files that are dumped in controlled directories and the weird entries that are added to project and solution files.
As with many decisions in life, to know we are doing it properly, we need to ask the most pure questions: What is source control supposed to do?
Answer: It is supposed to provide protection for code
It also provides a record of changes but fundamentally it is about protecting code from accidental changes - which can be reversed if needed and also from intentional changes that can be traced easily by check in comments. If your Source Control does not ALWAYS protect code, it is not good.
Let's look back to good old Microsoft who have somehow managed to mangle Sourcesafe into several different forms and somehow keep its geriatric body alive. How does Source Control work in Visual Studio?
1) Connecting a project to source control. This is a complete ball ache in Visual Studio. In VS2015, there is a Team Explorer, a Source Control Explorer, Context Menus, Menus under File->Source Control and workspace mappings. Do I create the project first in VSTS and then connect or can I simply "create new project" from my uncontrolled source? This is so hard to follow that even though I have done it about 20 times on different projects, I still can't do it right first time. Also, why is it that sometimes you "Add solution to source control" and not all of the projects show that little green plus symbol? Answer - no idea.
2) Disconnecting a project from source control. The short answer is that I think this is largely impossible UNLESS you disconnect, move the project to another folder and rename the destination project in Source Control. You can select File->Source Control->Advanced! and then choose to unbind the project. Why this is advanced, I do not know. Unbind it and guess what? There are still source control binding files on the disk, it is just pretending to be unbound. Try and bind it to another project in Source Control? Good luck, you will get that infamous message, "The item blah is already under source control at the selected location". What? I just disconnected it! No you didn't, we were just pretending.
3) Deleting a project on the server. Be VERY careful when you do this. Do you know what happened last time I did that? Visual Studio decided that since I deleted the server project, I obviously didn't want any of my local files. Yes, it deleted everything on my local disk, which is the OPPOSITE of what anyone ever wants. At minimum, you would ask, by default it would keep whatever was there. Another gotcha is basically Visual Studio being completely unable to handle the deleted project when there are local changes - how does it know there are local changes if the project was deleted in SCC? It basically forces you to undo the pending changes, even though they are irrelevant and if you don't? You get errors every time you try and edit workspace mappings. What happens if you undo your changes? You guessed it, you lose all the changes which you cannot undo because the project is now deleted!
4) Moving a project from one SCC binding to another? Forget it. Best way is to great a new project and manually copy stuff over. Honestly, that is Source Control 101 but for some reason, MS still haven't got the basics right.
Other options? You can use the command line or some tool outside of VS to manage source control, it's annoying but it seems to work much better than VS does and makes more sense because everything is in the same place.
The truth is, if you do this all the time, you will HOPEFULLY not delete anything but for the rest of us, be prepared to lose your job...oh yeah and ALWAYS make backup copies of folders before doing anything other than checking-in changes to files.
As with many decisions in life, to know we are doing it properly, we need to ask the most pure questions: What is source control supposed to do?
Answer: It is supposed to provide protection for code
It also provides a record of changes but fundamentally it is about protecting code from accidental changes - which can be reversed if needed and also from intentional changes that can be traced easily by check in comments. If your Source Control does not ALWAYS protect code, it is not good.
Let's look back to good old Microsoft who have somehow managed to mangle Sourcesafe into several different forms and somehow keep its geriatric body alive. How does Source Control work in Visual Studio?
1) Connecting a project to source control. This is a complete ball ache in Visual Studio. In VS2015, there is a Team Explorer, a Source Control Explorer, Context Menus, Menus under File->Source Control and workspace mappings. Do I create the project first in VSTS and then connect or can I simply "create new project" from my uncontrolled source? This is so hard to follow that even though I have done it about 20 times on different projects, I still can't do it right first time. Also, why is it that sometimes you "Add solution to source control" and not all of the projects show that little green plus symbol? Answer - no idea.
2) Disconnecting a project from source control. The short answer is that I think this is largely impossible UNLESS you disconnect, move the project to another folder and rename the destination project in Source Control. You can select File->Source Control->Advanced! and then choose to unbind the project. Why this is advanced, I do not know. Unbind it and guess what? There are still source control binding files on the disk, it is just pretending to be unbound. Try and bind it to another project in Source Control? Good luck, you will get that infamous message, "The item blah is already under source control at the selected location". What? I just disconnected it! No you didn't, we were just pretending.
3) Deleting a project on the server. Be VERY careful when you do this. Do you know what happened last time I did that? Visual Studio decided that since I deleted the server project, I obviously didn't want any of my local files. Yes, it deleted everything on my local disk, which is the OPPOSITE of what anyone ever wants. At minimum, you would ask, by default it would keep whatever was there. Another gotcha is basically Visual Studio being completely unable to handle the deleted project when there are local changes - how does it know there are local changes if the project was deleted in SCC? It basically forces you to undo the pending changes, even though they are irrelevant and if you don't? You get errors every time you try and edit workspace mappings. What happens if you undo your changes? You guessed it, you lose all the changes which you cannot undo because the project is now deleted!
4) Moving a project from one SCC binding to another? Forget it. Best way is to great a new project and manually copy stuff over. Honestly, that is Source Control 101 but for some reason, MS still haven't got the basics right.
Other options? You can use the command line or some tool outside of VS to manage source control, it's annoying but it seems to work much better than VS does and makes more sense because everything is in the same place.
The truth is, if you do this all the time, you will HOPEFULLY not delete anything but for the rest of us, be prepared to lose your job...oh yeah and ALWAYS make backup copies of folders before doing anything other than checking-in changes to files.