Pending Changes

In Team Foundation source control, your changes to files or namespaces are persisted locally until you check them in. These locally-persisted changes are referred to as a pending changes. The Check In and Pending Changes windows are used to view and manage pending changes. For more information, see Using the Check In and Pending Changes Windows.

Types of Pending Changes

A pending change is a file revision or namespace change to an item in a workspace. Specifically, a file revision is a change to the content of a file and a namespace change is a change to the location or name of a file or folder in a source control workspace.

The current status of all files and folders in all workspaces for a server is maintained in their workspace definitions on the Team Foundation Server. Any user with appropriate permissions can see if a change is pending against an item, what type of pending change it represents, who made the change, and in which workspace.

Prior to check-in, file revisions are referred to as pending editions and namespace changes as pending additions, pending edits, pending deletions, pending renames, pending moves, pending branch, and pending file encoding.

Pending Additions

When you add a file to a source-controlled project, Visual Studio assumes that you intend to edit it in some way prior to making it available to your teammates. Therefore, newly added files are not checked in automatically and are treated as a pending addition ** to source control until you explicitly check in your uncommitted changes and thereby make them available to teammates.

Pending Edits

When you check out a file to edit in your workspace, Team Foundation makes it writable and adds it to the list of pending changes for the workspace. By default, multiple users can check out and edit the same file concurrently from a Team Foundation server. It is possible to lock a file however. For more information, see How to: Lock and Unlock Folders or Files.

Pending Deletions

When you delete a file, it is deleted from your local disk; however, it stays on the server until the pending deletion gets checked in. For more information, see How to: Delete Files and Folders from Source Control.

Pending Undelete

When you undelete a file, it will be restored from the server during the check- in process.

Pending Renames and Pending Moves

When you rename or move a file, it is renamed or moved on your local disk, but the changes are not reflected on the server until the pending check-in occurs. You must check in deletions along with all of your other pending changes. For more information, How to: Move, Rename, and Delete Source-Controlled Files and Folders.

Pending Branch

When you create a branch, the branch operation on the Team Foundation source control server is not committed until the branch gets checked in. For more information, see How to: Branch Files and Folders.

Pending File Encoding Change

When you change the file encoding of a file, the operation is not committed until the file change gets checked in. For more information see, How to: Configure Source Control File Encoding.

Managing Pending Changes

A pending change is created when you add an item to source control or check out an item from its workspace in order to edit, delete, rename, or move it.

At any time, you can view and manage the pending changes in your current workspace using the Pending Changes window in Visual Studio.

Depending upon your needs, you can perform one of the following four actions to a pending change:

  • Check In

  • Shelve

  • Unshelve

  • Undo

Checking In Pending Changes

When you check in pending changes, Team Foundation creates a new changeset in the server. Thereafter, your teammates can access your code by performing a Get Latest operation.

For information about how to check in your pending changes, see How to: Check In Pending Changes.

Use the Get Latest command prior to checking in your pending changes to download the most recent sources from the server and compile your code to ensure that it does not break the build. For more information about checking in pending changes, see Submitting Changes to the Source Control Server.

Shelving and Unshelving Pending Changes

When necessary, you can move pending changes out of your workspace using the Shelve command. You can also perform an unshelve operation. For more information, see How to: Shelve and Unshelve Pending Changes.

Undoing Pending Changes

Finally, you can remove pending changes from your workspace and revert to the base workspace version using the Undo command.

See Also

Tasks

How to: View and Manage All Pending Changes in Your Workspace
How to: View Pending Changes in Other Workspaces

Concepts

Working with Source Control Workspaces

Other Resources

Working with Source Control Files and Folders