Distributing include files: Cloaking by default?

Question

Hello,

We have a bunch of common tools which many of our (20+) teams make use of. The binaries for these tools are distributed by a dedicated deployment file server (they're built centrally so that each developer does not have to do that manually at each change). We're about to migrate to using Team System (we have been using VSS before), and we're having some trouble doing the following thing: Most of the tools have include files which have to be included into the projects in order to use the tools, and right now, these are situated in a separate VSS database (that's more of a deployment thing, too). The include files are organized exactly as the source files are (they're copied from there), but in the deployment VSS database, the sources are of course omitted.

An idea was - in order to prevent any hazzle and to keep the sources in place - to cloak the source files (or better: everything except the include files) for the tool projects, and for developers who do not work on the tools projects. Like this:

$/Common

Tool1

include
source [cloaked]

Tool2

include
source[cloaked]

The normal developer would just recursively get the "Common" project into his workspace, but would not need to get the sources, resources, etc. Is there a possibility to get this kind of behaviour for a certain group of users, and the normal behaviour for an other group of users (the tool developers)?

An obvious alternative is of course having the following structure, but that splits the source from the include files, and that's not so nice, either:

$/Common

include

Tool1
Tool2

source

Tool1
Tool2

I'm not sure if I could make myself clear about what I want to accomplish, but I hope so ;)

Best regards,
Martni

Answer 1

There's no way to have a folder be cloaked by default in other user's workspaces.  You can create workspaces by using one as a template (using the /template:otherWorkspace;otherUser option in the tf.exe workspace command).  However, that only helps with the initial creation of the workspace.

Buck