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Shelving and Unshelving in TFS

6/17/2008 4:48:49 PM

AlGonzalez

87 posts

nomadicview.blogspot.com/

Shelving and Unshelving in TFS

I'm just trying to get an idea of how people are using this feature. That is when/why do you shelve code?

I've seen that it is being compared to a private branch in Subversion, but does it actually shelve all the code in repository or only the code that has changed?

Al Gonzalez
P.S. Solutions, Inc.
http://www.linkedin.com/in/algonzalez

6/17/2008 5:09:10 PM

AlGonzalez

87 posts

nomadicview.blogspot.com/

Re: Shelving and Unshelving in TFS

I just read a blog where the developer keeps a wip (work in progress) shelveset. If he needs to look at something for someone else or a feature is prioritized up, he shelves his current work and reverts to the current code base to do the necessary work. Later he unshelves his wip shelveset and continues working on the prior code changes. By always naming it 'wip' it gets overwritten and he doesn't need to remember to delete it.

I guess it is nice to have a built-in feature for this. In Subversion you would have to create a private branch, switch to it, commit your changes, switch back to trunk, work on the new priority and commit, switch to private branch, revert to branch, switch to trunk and continue working on the prior code changes.

If this feature becomes popular, perhaps the TortoiseSVN project will add a command to do the above in fewer steps.

Al Gonzalez
P.S. Solutions, Inc.
http://www.linkedin.com/in/algonzalez

6/17/2008 5:16:30 PM

AlGonzalez

87 posts

nomadicview.blogspot.com/

Re: Shelving and Unshelving in TFS

After searching for Subversion and Shelve, it seems that the current recommendation is to create private branches under a shelves/{username} folder in the Subversion repository.

In other words, in addition to creating the trunk, branches, tags folders for a project, you would create a shelves folder.

When a developer (say agonzalez) create his private branches, he would use svn://{server}/{projectname}/shelves/agonzalez/{branchname}

Again, this is a bit more convoluted than the Shelve functionality in TFS but it does seem to work.

Al Gonzalez
P.S. Solutions, Inc.
http://www.linkedin.com/in/algonzalez

6/17/2008 5:21:22 PM

AlGonzalez

87 posts

nomadicview.blogspot.com/

Re: Shelving and Unshelving in TFS

After a bit more reading (I haven't tried it), it seems that when you create a shelveset TFS saves the items along with any associated Work Items or Check-in Notes.

This is a nice feature - although there is no equivalent work around when using Subversion since it does not include Work Items tracking.

Al Gonzalez
P.S. Solutions, Inc.
http://www.linkedin.com/in/algonzalez

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