Silly Visual Studio Pending Changes Question

Question

I recently switched from a Java based project to a C#/.net project. I previously used IntelliJ which had the concept of change lists where you could group your pending changes together and check each group in individually.

I have two problems with the pending changes window in visual studio.

1) Every time I check anything in, visual studio checks the checkbox beside Every pending change in the list forcing me to uncheck each and every one of them so I don't accidentally check something in. This is extremely frustrating because there are several files that I need to keep changed to correctly run my code locally. Is there any way to change this default behavior to not check any pending changes on check-in?

2) Is there any way to group changes into lists as opposed one big bucket of changes? Again this becomes frustrating when I need to check something in, but I have to search through the files and check the pertinent changes. I understand that shelve sets exist using TFS, but that doesn't cut it for me, especially since I have several changed files that I need to keep altered in order to correctly deploy locally, and I rarely ever want to check in.

Thanks in advance!

Answer 1

No, I don't know of a way to fix your problems. It sounds like the best answer would be to refactor your configuration settings or code so that you can check in all of your changes.

Answer 2

I have to manage lots of changes every day in Visual Studio, and I've got a few tips for you, but no silver bullet:

Use Ctrl-A to select all items and then press a checkbox to toggle the checkboxes for all items. This can be useful when performing changes to only a few items -- just uncheck everything, then make sure you have only the items checked that you'd like to update.

Use Ctrl-Click (then right-click) to 'Undo' selected changes. By default, the undo action will only apply to the selected items.

You might want to experiment with using multiple Workspaces -- and then filtering changes by workspace or by solution.