on p 222 - 1st para suggests that an issue with this approach is the increased use of storage since "each product family set of branches contained in version control has a copy of dependencies."

But I thought that branches contained only 'pointers' to the files, p 190: "when you perform the branch, it doesn't actually create new copies .. it just creates a record pointing to them."

Please clarify if possible ASAP we are planning our tfs structure and space usage is a big concern (and we have quite a few 3rd party assemblies).

thx, riix

You left out the nearby sentence that includes the word "potentially" as in

"This potentially can cause more data storage to be used"

The pointer argument still holds, protecting you from massive duplication of 3rd-party DLLs when you branch. But if you CHANGE lots of these files in one branch, then it must try to find a way to keep up with the differences.

I recommend Bill Heys' post on the subject
http://blogs.msdn.com/b/billheys/arc...ned-files.aspx

Unless you do some really weird things with your dependencies, I don't see you will have a problem. First, a sensible strategy for dependencies is to put them in folders with version numbers on them. So you would usually not change a file, but would simply add a new version from time to time. In my experience, we do not churn dependencies a great deal.

If you are still nervous after reading Bill's very authoritative (from the product team) post, just do a quick experiment and watch your database after adding 100 MB of DLLS and then branching.