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Suspend your work and manage your shelvesets

  • Article
  • 5 minutes to read

Azure DevOps Services | Azure DevOps Server 2022 | Azure DevOps Server 2020 | Azure DevOps Server 2019 | TFS 2018

Visual Studio 2022 | Visual Studio 2019 | Visual Studio 2017 | Visual Studio 2015 | Visual Studio 2013

For various reasons, sometimes you need to set aside some or all of your work in progress. Shelvesets are useful when you want to stop work for:

  • Interruption: You have pending changes that aren't ready for check-in, but you need to work on a different task.
  • Collaboration: You have pending changes that aren't ready for check-in but you need to share them with another team member.
  • Code Review: You want another team member to perform a code review of your pending changes. To learn more about using code review, see Day in the life of a devops developer: write new code for a user story.
  • Private Build: Before you check in your changes, you can use your automated build system to build and test your code.
  • Backup: You have work in progress that you can't finish but want to make a backup copy. The backup copy is stored on your server and is available to other team members who might need to access it.
  • Handoff: You have work in progress that you want to hand off to another team member.

You can move your pending changes to a shelveset on the server and then clean your workspace. The shelveset saves your file revisions, comment, list of related work items, and check-in notes when you evaluate policies before shelving.

Prerequisites

You must be one of the Contributors for your project. To learn more, see Default TFVC permissions.

Note

My Work and Code Review features are available with the following editions:

  • Visual Studio 2022: Visual Studio Community, Visual Studio Professional, and Visual Studio Enterprise
  • Visual Studio 2019, 2017, and 2915: Visual Studio Professional and Visual Studio Enterprise
  • Visual Studio 2013: Visual Studio Premium 2013 and Visual Studio Ultimate.

Suspend and resume your work from the My Work page

From My Work, you can save and restore your file changes and related work items. You can also restore the position of your open windows, breakpoints, and other important cues.

In Team Explorer, choose Home, my work Home, and then choose My Work. On the My Work page, choose Suspend & Shelve, and then type a description of the suspended work.

Screenshot of Suspend and shelve.

When you're ready to resume the work, go the Suspended & Shelved Work section of the My Work page, select a set of suspended work, and choose Resume.

Screenshot of Resume.

Shelve your changes

Tip

In either Solution Explorer or Source Control Explorer, you can shelve a specific subset of the files that you're working with: select them, open their context menu, and then choose Shelve Pending Changes. The Pending Changes page appears, ready to shelve only the files you selected.

To shelve your changes

  1. In Team Explorer, choose Home, pending changes Home, and then choose Pending Changes.

  2. In the Pending Changes page, make sure that the changes you want to shelve are listed in the Included Changes section. You can drag files between Included Changes and Excluded Changes (Keyboard shortcut: open the context menu of an item, and then choose Include or Exclude.

  3. Choose the Shelve link.

  4. Type a name for the shelveset.

    Screenshot of shelveset Name.

  5. (Optional) Select either of the following check boxes:

    • Preserve pending change locally

      By default, this check box is selected. When this check box is selected, your pending changes (including the comment and the Related Work Items list) aren't removed from your workspace. If you want to clean your workspace to work on another task, you should clear this check box.

    • Evaluate Policies and check-in notes before shelving

      When you select this check box, all check-in policies are evaluated before the shelveset is created. For more information about check-in policies, see Set and Enforce Quality Gates.

  6. Choose the Shelve button.

Find a shelveset

To find a shelveset

  1. In Team Explorer, choose Home, pending changes Home, and then choose Pending Changes.

  2. Choose the Actions link, and then choose Find Shelvesets.

  3. On the Find Shelvesets page, enter the name or alias of a project team member in the box, and then choose the Enter key.

    Screenshot of Find shelvesets.

    Tip

    If you don't know the name of the owner, you can type * to list shelvesets for all users.

  4. A list of shelvesets appears in the Results list. You can type a filter to reduce the size of the list.

View and work with a shelveset

After you have a list of shelvesets (explained in "To find a shelveset") in the Find Shelvesets page, double-click the shelveset to view it.

The Shelveset Details page appears.

Screenshot of Shelveset details.

  • You can toggle between list and tree view from the Actions menu.

  • To get more information about a change to a file, open its context menu, and then choose Open, View History, or one of the Compare options.

  • Choose Unshelve Changes if you want to retrieve the changes in the shelveset into your workspace:

    1. For any file changes that you don't want to unshelve, open the context menu of the file, and then choose Exclude.

    2. If you want to delete the shelveset, clear the Preserve shelveset on server check box.

    3. If you don't want to restore the work item list and check-in notes that are stored in the shelveset clear the Restore work items and check-in notes check box.

    4. Choose the Unshelve button.

    If there are conflicts between changes in the shelveset and the file versions in your workspace, the system will prompt you to resolve them.

  • Choose Delete Shelveset if you want to delete the shelveset.

    Warning

    Be sure you don't need any of the work stored in a shelveset before you delete it. There is no way to recover a deleted shelveset.

Work from the command prompt

Tip

  • Unlike a changeset, a shelveset is a non-versioned entity. If you or another user unshelve the items of which a shelveset consists, edit several files, and then later reshelve the shelveset, the system does not create a new version of the items for future comparison and maintains no record of who revised the items, when, or in what manner. The original shelveset is completely replaced.
  • Conflicts can occur and prevent you from resuming suspended work. If this happens, see Resolve Team Foundation Version Control conflicts.