My team is in the process of transitioning from SVN to TFS for version control. One lesson we just learned the hard way was that TFS doesn’t support the concept of nested branching. Early on in our transition I branched an individual folder and things had been going quite smooth until yesterday when we needed to branch the main folder to spin off a side-project and TFS gave me a nice message about the folder already containing a branch. Uh oh…

I spent a few hours grasping at straws trying to get out of this situation. I even tried reverting a couple of changesets with the rollback functionality included in the TFS 2010 Power Tools but nothing seemed to get rid of the old branch. Eventually I stumbled across this MSDN forum post that said the command to change a branch back to a folder is just a matter clicking File -> Source Control -> Branching and Merging -> Convert to Folder in Visual Studio. After selecting that menu item the branch icon changed back to the standard folder icon and I was able to create the new branch.  Had this option been available in the context menu I’d have found it right away rather than spinning my wheels but now I know it’s there should I need it again.