Does a feature like “TFS auto-checkout before checkin” exist, so that I don’t checkout any file until the moment I say “checkin”, e.g. in case I only change files temporarily – which happens all the time.
In other words, client-side I want to work as if using subversion, regardless of what the TFS server might think. This must be possible, I just wonder if it is easy to setup.
In yet other words, until and unless I say ‘checkin’, other users shouldn’t (be able to) bother what files I’m editing.
You can tell Visual studio not to check out on edit, go to tools, options, source control, environment. Then select the behaviour you want. If you choose editing to “do nothing” and saving to “prompt for checkout” it should be pretty close to what you want.
You could also look at svnBridge which allows you to use TortoiseSVN with TFS. I assume that the point of svnBridge is to allow developers used to SVN to use TFS without having to change the way they work, so it should meet your needs.
A combination of both of these should get you close.