October 25, 2011 
In this series of blog posts I like to highlight some features of TFS/Visual Studio that people seem to overlook. In my day to day job I often see that people don’t know about certain feature that are available in Team Foundation Server, Visual Studio or some of the Powertools.
Some features are available as a Powertool. These can be downloaded from here
Earlier Posts
- Hidden Gems in TFS – Part 1 Annotate
- Hidden Gems in TFS – Part 2 Work Item State Diagrams
- Hidden Gems in TFS – Part 3 Editing multiple work items at the same time (Bulk Edit)
- Hidden Gems in TFS – Part 4 Finding status in Source Control
- Hidden Gems in TFS – Part 5 Handling alerts and notifications
In this part…….
Managing workspaces in TFS with Workspace templates
Another powertool feature and yet again widely unused by customers. Workspace templates. Often developers have their own way of organizing folders and files. Some people create different structures than others.
When working is a development team in 1 project, it is very useful to have the same structure on your local disk. In this manner you can use relative paths and make configuration a bit easier.
TFS provides you with the concept of workspace. In short, a workspace is a mapping of one or more local folder(s) to one or more source control folder(s).
Because you can flexibly create workspaces developers have a lot of freedom in structuring their projects.
With workspace templates you can provide your developers with a standard way of organizing their workspace. Your whole team uses the same structure and enjoys all the benefits.
How does this look?:
- In Team Explorer right click on Team Members and choose Team Settings. If team members is not in your explorer install the powertools first
- On the general Tab create a new workspace template. Create mappings or import from an existing workspace. Watch the z:\{root} which indicates that people can still choose their root folder. Inside the folder it will contain the structure as you define in the template
- Save the template
- As a team member you can now easily right click Team Members and choose Create Workspace
- Provide a root path on your own machine and voila. Structure is created automatically
Have fun !
The Road to ALM 
Great post! Exaclty what we’ve been looking for here!
Is this possible in 2012?
Yes ! You need to install the TFS 2012 powertools ! You find this in the team members section of Team Explorer.
Why is this not a standard feature, usable from the regular GUI? It is very useful…
The “why” should be answered by the product team. I can only agree with you!
This is a great article. The link you’ve provided is for VS 2010. Here’s the link for VS 2013:
https://visualstudiogallery.msdn.microsoft.com/f017b10c-02b4-4d6d-9845-58a06545627f