Take a look on Undo Unchanged command of the Team Foundation Server Power Tools August 2011

c:\myProject> tfpt uu . /noget /recursive

Thanks Matt Florence for link update.

Thanks Ray Vega for actual syntax.

Updated this question with an answer when working with TFS2017 and VS2017/VS2019 only.

The power tools does not exist for TFS 2017 and the old ones can't work well together with it, but apparently most of the functionality has been moved to VS2017 itself or plugins (see below).

Visual Studio 2017/2019 Extension

Some actions like undo unchanged files have moved to an

extension for VS2017

extension for VS2019

"Undo Unchanged" button location:

Known bug

You have to open the 'Source Control Explorer' (and leave it open) so that the 'Undo Unchanged' is displayed in the Action menu of the Pending Changes view. reported here.

Windows Shell Integration Extension

Also, you can still set up Windows shell integration through an separate installer which is no longer linked to TFS Power Tools.

The windows shell integration do not work exactly the same as the powertools before, but the most important actions worked for me.

If you simply check all the files back in again that you checked out, TFS is smart enough to figure out which ones changes and only include them in the changeset that is recorded on the server.

TFS does this by comparing MD5 hashes of the files contents before and after check-in.

This is all assuming that your generation process is purely updating the same set of files, i.e. you will never have the case where a file that was generated in a previous generation is not needed in the next generation (i.e. you would want to pend a delete for that file) or that the files change name.

If your process could potentially need files deleting, the your best bet might be to look at the Team Foundation Power Tools command (tfpt) and use the tfpt online command that will only check out the files that have changed, and will be smart enough to pend deletes for any files that are no longer needed or changed name and pend adds.

Good luck,

Martin.

I'm a bit late to the party, but if you have control over the batch script you could simply not check out any files during the generation process and then run something along the lines of:

tf reconcile [path-to-local-folder] /promote /adds /deletes /recursive

to make sure you check out only the files you intend to check-in. You can read more about the reconcile command and its syntax here:

https://docs.microsoft.com/en-us/azure/devops/repos/tfvc/reconcile-command

As far as I understood, in TFS if you checkout a team project, the whole project is checked out and you do not have control of which files are brought down. If you want to prevent checkins to certain files, you can lock them.

At work, we all hate TFS.