TFS Shelvesets and Team Foundation Sidekicks
Using Shelvesets in Microsoft Team Foundation Server can be a valuable and time saving technique. But leveraging and managing Shelvesets can get cumbersome. I recently had to extract changes from a Shelveset in one branch of code to another. How can this be done quickly and effectively? In this post, I’ll walk through how you can leverage Attrice Corporation’s Team Foundation Sidekicks’ Shelveset Sidekick feature and a folder compare tool (I use Beyond Compare) to quickly achieve this task.
After downloading Team Foundation Sidekicks and installing the application, launch Team Foundation Sidekicks’ Shelveset Sidekick and connect to your TFS Server. Then select the Shelveset Sidekick link from the menu:
Or alternatively, you can use the Team Foundation Sidekicks menu option directly from the Tools menu in Visual Studio:
Once you have the Shelveset Sidekick view open, set your search criteria and click Search. When the results appear, select the Shelveset you would like to export and select Export (highlighted below).
Select a new directory to save your files. Now, we can easily compare the Shelveset files with a branch of code, or another shelveset, using a folder comparison tool such as Beyond Compare.
Viola! Happy merging.
