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?

Answer 1

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:

1. To shelve your current pending changes, right click the project, Shelve, add a shelve name
2. This will save (or Shelve) the changes to the server (no-one will see them)
3. You then do Undo Pending Changes to revert your code back to the last check-in point
4. You can then do what you need to do with the reverted code baseline
5. 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.