I'm an extreme newbie to managing TFS, so please bear with me and know I'll need baby steps. I'll try to be as specific as possible.
I recently inherited an MVC ASP.net website written by a former colleague. Generally he would work directly in the production environment and commit changes as he went along. Obviously that's not good practice, so when I received it I decided to set it up in TFS along with a proper testing and development environment. I created the team project collection, added the existing solution to the collection, set up branching and branch hierarchy, and mapped the work environments. From what I can tell it's set up just like our other site that was configured in TFS before I came on (the person who set it up is long gone).
The issue I'm seeing now is that checking in changes don't seem to be affecting the actual code behind the site. Whether I make the changes in the test branch and then check-in/merge changeset with the production branch, or make the changes directly in production, saving and checking in changes doesn't actually affect the site. If I go into solution explorer and look at the files I just edited, my checked-in changes are not there. Same if I edit a web.config or something, I can then open in up in another text editor and my changes are nowhere to be found.
I followed Microsoft's instructions as closely as I could but clearly I missed something, I just have no idea what.