Delete Visual Studio Online Project

Overview
I recently had a project that I wanted to remove from my Visual Studio Online source control system. I hadn’t done this before so I went about attempting to remove the projects via the normal means. Here is how I went about it.

Trial and Error
Naturally I first logged into my Visual Studio Online account, opened the project in the Collection Administration page and searched for some way to delete the project. However, I found that there was no available way to do this.

The next thing I tried is to delete the project from within Visual Studio 2013. I connected to my Visual Studio Online source control system, opened the Source Control Explorer and found that there was an option to right-click the project and select Delete. Of course it wasn’t that easy though. Upon selecting Delete the following error dialog appeared.

Error displayed when trying to delete a Visual Studio Online project locally.

Now I’m the administrator of the entire site so I knew permissions weren’t an issue. It also surprised me that there was an option to delete a project from within Visual Studio, but that it wasn’t supported. I tried searching the Visual Studio Online support pages. I did find entries for deleting projects from Visual Studio Online. However, all of them directed me to pages for removing projects from within Visual Studio itself. Then I stumbled upon another article that showed me what I was missing.

How to Delete Projects
It turns out I was actually pretty close the first time. Here is how you delete a project from your Visual Studio Online account.

1. Login to your Visual Studio Online account (you must be an admin).
2. Click the gear to the right of your name in the upper-right hand corner.
3. In the Control Panel page, hover over the project name and then click the 3 dots that appear to the right of the name and select Delete.
4. Type the name of the project and click the button to confirm.
5. The dialog will tell you that it will be scheduled for deletion; click the button to close the dialog box.
6. Click the refresh button on the project list (circular arrow) occasionally to check for when the project has been deleted.

Summary

That’s it! The project has now been deleted. The part I missed was step 4 (right-clicking the project name). It seems silly now that I wouldn’t try that. I guess I don’t generally expect web pages to have right-click functionality. There’s also nothing that I found to indicate that this functionality is available or how to do it. Now you know!

Discover File Changes Made Outside of Visual Studio

Overview

I recently had an issue where I had to rollback an entire branch in TFS and then hand apply a whole mess of changes. There were entire sub-branches that needed to remain the latest version and other files that had to be hand edited. Overall it was a large job.

In an effort to speed up the process for those folders that needed to remain as the latest version I decided to work outside of Visual Studio and TFS. I manually removed the rolled back versions of the folders and copied the folder from a backup I’d made before rolling back into the appropriate location in my local source control folder. The only problem was that Visual Studio / TFS didn’t recognize that a change had been made.

Here’s how you get those changes made outside of Visual Studio to be recognized as changed in Visual Studio.

Steps

1. Visit the Visual Studio Extensions site for Team Foundation Server Power Tools (TFPT).
2. Download and install the package.
3. Once installed, open a command prompt.
4. Navigate to the TFPT installation folder (where tfpt.exe is located).
5. Run the “tfpt.exe online” and optionally include the following switches as needed.
   1. “/adds” will pick up any added files.
   2. “/deletes” will pick up any removed files.
   3. “/diff” will pick up any changed files.
   4. “/recursive” will look for changes through all sub folders.
   5. PATH is where to look for changes.

The complete command is as follows.

tfpt online /adds /deletes /diff /recursive PATH

Summary

This has allowed me to pick up all of those changes I made outside of the IDE and apply them to TFS as usual. One thing I noticed though is that even folders such as bin, obj, Debug, etc. will be picked up. You will need to make a determination yourself as to whether you want these included in your source control.

I hope this helps!