Alan Greensill on VSTS

Another TechEd 2004 Europe attendee, Alan Greensill, has a post that covers his thoughts on the source control portion of Visual Studio Team System.

Visual Studio 2005 Team System

The one that interested me the most was the application of Policy to check-ins. This allows rules to be defined at the Portfolio level to set rules such as “cannot check-in without at least x% test coverage”. This allows to sort of process and workflow rules that are vital to large team development to be enforced by the supporting toolset.
There was also a new concept called ‘Shelving’ that I liked. This allows developers to save unfinished changes to the repository for backup without checking them in (and no doubt breaking the build into the bargain). This is especially useful when you need to share code with someone else, for example to review it, prior to checking in. It is possible to refer to shelved files in work items (and also bugs etc.) so, for example, a developer could create a work item for a peer review and refer to the exact version of the shelved file to be reviewed. Any defects raised during the review can be raised as bugs again also referring to the file version.