Using TFS shelvesets to check if you have introduced a new bug.

Last night I was making a few code changes to an application to see what would be involved implementing a new feature. There weren’t that many changes but they were split across several layers of the application. To my dismay when I launched up the application the data field (silently) to read and write that data from the underlying storage system.

Because I had made a few changes it was possible that I had introduced the bug and I wanted to quickly check against the implementation that I got when I took the branch to implement the feature. Rather than manually putting aside the source files that I had modified (what were they again?) I decided to create a shelveset of my changes then undo my pending changes to take me back to the baseline.

I determined that there was an underlying bug in the code and that I hadn’t introduced the bug so I restored the shelveset and continued tinkering. The outcome isn’t that interesting, but I think the use of this unique TFS feature was a real time saver for me, and its not the first time that it has paid dividends.