Offline support on Visual Studio 2008 source control
July 30th, 2007
I’ve been playing with Visual Studio 2008 Beta 2 lately and found a little gem: offline support for source control. It does not do everything I would like (like ability to use the Source Control Explorer offline), but we get enough to work with a solution when there is no connection to TFS.
1. When you open a solution offline (no access to TFS) this dialog will pop up saying that the solution will be opened in offline mode. Click OK.
2. Let’s say you need to change “styles.css”. You open it and when you are done you will try saving it. You will get this known dialog saying that the file is write-protected. This is because the source control client protects the file against changes outside the tool.
Click on Overwrite to save the changes
3. Online again! Right click on the solution and press “Go Online”
4. Visual Studio 2008 will check the solution for changes while you were offline and will show this dialog. Press Go Online so the changes are applied in the TFS.
5. Notice how the styles.css file is checked out.
6. Now you can go on with more changes and check in your code. Changes made offline/online will be commited to TFS
Now there is no excuse if the TFS is down or you don’t have access to it 
We started this effort a month ago and now we have a v1!
The team conformed by Kent Boogaart, Bil Simser, Ward Bell, Chris Holmes, Ezequiel Jadib and myself worked together to get a decent release out!
The package includes the following:
- WPF CAB Layer
A full implementation of the UI layer for CAB with 100% code coverage! - Outlook Bar Workspace & Quickstart
This is a workspace that provides a user experience like the Outlook Navigation bar. It allows the developer to add a smartpart to it with a SmartPartInfo that provides information like the icon and the text of the button - CAB Visualizer (requires WPF)
A CAB Visualizer is a tool that you can use to understand what happens behind the scenes in any CAB application. It will show the skeleton of workitems, smartparts, workspaces, commands, event topics and services - BankTeller Quickstart rewritten using SCSF 2007 and Winforms smartparts
- BankTeller Quickstart using SCSF 2007 and WPF smartparts
The CAB Visualizer is soo cool. It will help both newbies and experts to understand better what is happening behind the scenes on a CAB application.
Download the binaries or the source code from the codeplex site!
Now that the Outlook Bar is finally in scsf contrib I will close codeplex.com/cabextensions.