Question

I recently switched from a Java based project to a C#/.net project. I previously used IntelliJ which had the concept of change lists where you could group your pending changes together and check each group in individually.

I have two problems with the pending changes window in visual studio.

1) Every time I check anything in, visual studio checks the checkbox beside Every pending change in the list forcing me to uncheck each and every one of them so I don’t accidentally check something in. This is extremely frustrating because there are several files that I need to keep changed to correctly run my code locally. Is there any way to change this default behavior to not check any pending changes on check-in?

2) Is there any way to group changes into lists as opposed one big bucket of changes? Again this becomes frustrating when I need to check something in, but I have to search through the files and check the pertinent changes. I understand that shelve sets exist using TFS, but that doesn’t cut it for me, especially since I have several changed files that I need to keep altered in order to correctly deploy locally, and I rarely ever want to check in.

Thanks in advance!

Answer 1

I have to manage lots of changes every day in Visual Studio, and I’ve got a few tips for you, but no silver bullet:

Use Ctrl+A to select all items and then press a checkbox to toggle the checkboxes for all items. This can be useful when performing changes to only a few items — just uncheck everything, then make sure you have only the items checked that you’d like to update.

Use Ctrl+Click (then right-click) to ‘Undo’ selected changes. By default, the undo action will only apply to the selected items.

You might want to experiment with using multiple Workspaces — and then filtering changes by workspace or by solution.