TIPP: Toad For Oracle 12.6 does not support TFS 2013 Team Projects with Blanks in Their Names

Although it is not recommended to use blanks in names for TFS team projects, this option is supported and therefore you can end up with a team project named like that. This would be a showstopper for using this particular team project for versioning database objects with Toad For Oracle 12.6, because Toad does not support team projects with blanks (spaces) in their names.

Toad For Oracle 12.6 and Team Foundation Server 2013: Associating Work Items with Changesets While Performing Check-ins from Toad

 

As stated in the Toad for Oracle 12.1 - Release Notes, this version introduces the following feature “When using Team Foundation Server (TFS) in Toad, you can now check-in TFS Work Items and link one or more TFS work items to the check-in change set.” Additionally, the next version “Toad 12.5 supports Microsoft Team Foundation Server 2013 (TFS)”, as stated by Toad for Oracle 12.5 – Release Notes.

In other words, it is possible to associate work items with database changes while performing a check-in action from Toad for Oracle 12.6 when connected to a Team Foundation Server 2013 Team Project. This blog describes the main characteristics of this integration feature.

TIPP: VS Team Explorer 2012 Required for Associating Work Items with Changesets from Toad For Oracle 12.6 to Team Foundation Server 2013

As stated in the Toad for Oracle 12.1 - Release Notes, this version introduced the following feature “When using Team Foundation Server (TFS) in Toad, you can now check-in TFS Work Items and link one or more TFS work items to the check-in change set.” In other words, it should be possible to associate work items with database changes while performing a check-in action from Toad for Oracle.

Additionally, the next version “Toad 12.5 supports Microsoft Team Foundation Server 2013 (TFS)”, as stated by Toad for Oracle 12.5 – Release Notes.

I am currently working with Toad 12.6.0.53 with Team Coding 7.1 – Trial, and I found out that the feature for associating work items during check-in unfortunately does not work out of the box on a client machine where Visual Studio 2013 Update 3 or Team Explorer for Visual Studio 2013 bits are installed. In order to solve the error you need to install Team Explorer for Visual Studio 2012.

Workaround for Setting up Workspace Mappings in Toad for Oracle 12.6 and Team Foundation Server 2013 (RTM or Update N)

Challenge:

Recently I had the chance to work again with Toad for Oracle and its versioning control options called Team Coding for purposes of versioning Oracle databases with TFS.

I am currently using the latest available bits, namely Toad 12.6.0.53 with Team Coding 7.1 and Team Foundation Server 2013 Update 3.

Note: I am using the Visual Studio 2013 Application Lifecycle Management Virtual Machine currently with TFS 2013 Update 3 and Visual Studio 2013 Update 3, where I have additionally installed the Oracle Demo DB locally (Oracle Database 11g Release 2 (11.2.0.1.0) for Microsoft Windows (x64))

Setting up Team Coding consists of several steps. The overview of the newest version is available in this video "The new Team Coding Dashboard in Toad for Oracle 12". No official instructions for the newest version are available at the moment of writing this, except the application’s built-in help. The older version 11.6 is documented in "Version Control and Team Coding in Toad for Oracle 11.6", and is useful as a startup guide if you are not familiar with the concept, but differs from the current Team Coding in several points regarding Team Coding and Code Collections (called Code Control Groups prior to Toad 11).

Moving further to my scenario, one of the steps you need to perform when setting up Team Coding is creating a new TFS workspace and defining mappings from TFS source folders to local folders.