What are the consequences of renaming a branch in TFS 2012?

Question

I\'ve read in many places that renaming a branch is rather problematic in TFS 2010 : you may lose the history of the branch you just renamed ( as seen in this article or in this

Answer 1

The biggest problem with renaming a branch, is that you will effectively be performing a baseless merge next time you merge to or from the renamed branch. This can cause a lot of pain.

I'm currently trying to untangle such a mess at the moment and its not pleasant. (Branch was renamed 4 months ago. The first merge from the branch was partial) its a nightmare I wouldn't wish on my worst enemy (who coincidently are the devs who renamed the branch and did the partial merge)

See this answer for more info

Answer 2

DON'T DO IT!!! You might be able to rename it on the server, but from my experience TFS wants to check every file out... basically treating it like a copy.

Answer 3

You can do it, but depends what situation you're in. For my situation, I have the following structure:

Development
   ProjectX
      ProjectY
Main
Release

ProjectX is getting released sooner than ProjectY and it was merged to Development-->Main a week ago. Now, the name ProjectX isn't relevant anymore and also, there's a new project starting with a name ProjectZ so, I'm going to rename ProjectY to ProjectZ and rename ProjectX to ProjectY.

Both X, Y and Z are to be merged fully once they move to the standard release cycle so I don't have to worry about merging piece by piece.