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I worked in a large software house with 50+ devs. We've come across an issue recently using TFS where one dev will make some changes to some files, shelve the changes and then another dev will go and make those exact same changes, not knowing that they have already been done, but not yet checked in. Clearly wasting time.

Does anyone know of any options/addons that give an indication of whether a file being worked on also has a related shelveset?

jessehouwing
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BenM
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    Don't fix with software what should be fixed in your organization. Sounds like the developers aren't communicating enough. – CodeCaster May 27 '15 at 10:24
  • It'd be far better to do so with software rather than relying on 50+ developers sending out an email each time they access a file and shelve it. It would be unmanagable to even keep track of the communication. – BenM May 27 '15 at 10:25
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    I've asked Microsoft to add this to the "Incoming Changes" Lens in Codelens, but it's not there. – jessehouwing May 27 '15 at 10:27
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    I'm not suggesting to send an email if you start working on a file. I mean if two developers are making the exact same change, it seems like no one is knowing what exactly is happening. Do you use an issue tracker or any form of project management? Not saying that this issue is unsolvable, with the TFS API you'll surely be able to query this information, but I'm not sure it's built into the current UI. – CodeCaster May 27 '15 at 10:27
  • We use TFS to track everything including our projects. It's still too much effort to go and search through the project stuff in TFS to see if someone has created a task for updating a file or set of files. It also then relies on human input. Simply having a small icon on a file to indicate an existing shelfset would be a far more productive way of checking. – BenM May 27 '15 at 10:29
  • I agree with @CodeMaster, this is an organisational dysfunction that can be solved by better organisation and communication between teams and members. – MrHinsh - Martin Hinshelwood Jun 02 '15 at 04:56

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There is no product I know of that offers this in plain view and integrated into TFS. It would be a great extension and I've personally requested this from the team that works in Codelens in the past. It may come in the future, but it's not there (yet).

I've created a UserVoice item to track this request just now.

Using the My Work feature to Suspend/Resume work would make it visible that there is a shelveset associated to a work item. It would make it a manual process and it's prone to failure, but at least it's a start.

Had your team worked with Branches or just committed the changes to source control, they would be visible to everyone. The Incoming Changes lens would even highlight these changes across branches.

It would not be too hard to create a script, and a bit harder to extend this into an Editor add-in using the Visual Studio SDK and the TFS Client Object Model, but a fully working version would be too broad a solution for the format used by StackOverflow.

jessehouwing
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