What is Shelving in TFS

Question

Is shelving in TFS merely a soft checkin so other team members can see the source code   i e  the shelved code will not be compiled right

User · Answer

Shelving is a way of saving all of the changes on your box without checking in. The changes are persisted on the server. At any later time you or any of your team-mates can "unshelve" them back onto any one of your machines.

It's also great for review purposes. On my team for a check in we shelve up our changes and send out an email with the change description and name of the changeset. People on the team can then view the changeset and give feedback.

FYI: The best way to review a shelveset is with the following command

tfpt review /shelveset:shelvesetName;userName

tfpt is a part of the Team Foundation Power Tools

User · Answer

One point that is missed in a lot of these discussions is how you revert back on the SAME machine on which you shelved your changes  Perhaps obvious to most  but wasn t to me  I believe you perform an Undo Pending Changes - is that right   I understand the process to be as follows    To shelve your current pending changes  right click the project  Shelve  add a shelve name This will save  or Shelve  the changes to the server  no-one will see them  You then do Undo Pending Changes to revert your code back to the last check-in point You can then do what you need to do with the reverted code baseline You can Unshelve the changes at any time  may require some merge confliction    So  if you want to start some work which you may need to Shelve  make sure you check-in before you start  as the check-in point is where you ll return to when doing the Undo Pending Changes step above

User · Answer

If you re using Gated builds  when a build is triggered  it creates a shelveset of your workspace that is submitted for build  If the build fails  the shelveset is rejected  If the build is successful  a changeset is created and committed to TFS  In either event  the person doing that check-in build will have to reconcile the workspace  which is as simple as performing a Get Latest

User · Answer

I come across this all the time  so supplemental information regarding branches   If you re working with multiple branches  shelvesets are tied to the specific branch in which you created them   So  if you let a changeset rust on the shelf for too long and have to unshelve to a different branch  then you have to do that with the July release of the power tools   tfpt unshelve  migrate

User · Answer

That s right  If you create a shelf  other people doing a get latest won t see your code   It puts your code changes onto the server  which is probably better backed up than your work PC   It enables you to pick up your changes on another machine  should you feel the urge to work from home   Others can see your shelves  though I think this may be optional  so they can review your code prior to a check-in

User · Answer

Shelving is like your changes have been stored in the source control without affecting the existing changes  Means if you check in a file in source control it will modify the existing file but shelving is like storing your changes in source control but without modifying the actual changes

User · Answer

JaredPar  Yes you can use Shelvesets for reviews but keep in mind that shelvesets can be overwritten by yourself others and therefore are not long term stable  Therefore for regulatory relevant reviews you should never use a Shelveset as base but rather a checkin  Changeset   For an informal review it is ok but not for a formal  E g  FTA relevant  review

User · Answer

Shelving has many uses  The main ones are    Context Switching  Saving the work on your current task so you can switch to another high priority task   Say you re working on a new feature  minding your own business  when your boss runs in and says  Ahhh  Bug Bug Bug   and you have to drop your current changes on the feature and go fix the bug   You can shelve your work on the feature  fix the bug  then come back and unshelve to work on your changes later  Sharing Changesets  If you want to share a changeset of code without checking it in  you can make it easy for others to access by shelving it   This could be used when you are passing an incomplete task to someone else  poor soul  or if you have some sort of testing code you would never EVER check in that someone else needed to run  h t to the other responses about using this for reviews  it is a very good idea  Saving your progress  While you re working on a complex feature  you may find yourself at a  good point  where you would like to save your progress  This is an ideal time to shelve your code  Say you are hacking up some CSS   HTML to fix rendering bugs  Usually you bang on it  iterating every possible kludge you can think up until it looks right  However  once it looks right you may want to try and go back in to cleanup your markup so that someone else may be able to understand what you did before you check it in  In this case  you can shelve the code when everything renders right  then you are free to go and refactor your markup  knowing that if you accidentally break it again  you can always go back and get your changeset    Any other uses

[tfs] What is Shelving in TFS?

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