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 SO question )
I cannot find any mention of those problems in TFS 2012. Are there any consequences I should be aware of before renaming a branch in TFS 2012 ?
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
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.
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.
来源：https://stackoverflow.com/questions/15522223/what-are-the-consequences-of-renaming-a-branch-in-tfs-2012