TFS and working with multiple solutions

Question

How do people generally deal with TFS when you've got to work with multiple solution files? If you've got one instance it's easy because you can always go to that window for the source control explorer, pending changes, check on builds or work items. But when you have 4-5 solutions, it becomes tricky to deal with. You might expand some folders or check some pending items on one VS instance but you have to remember which one you did it on.

Having a separate instance dedicated just to TFS tasks is tempting, but there's only one window state for the whole program. If that instance is closed last, all instances will come up with all the TFS windows open.

How do other people deal with this? Can you use separate profiles somehow and cordon off a "TFS" instance of Visual Studio?

Answer 1

If you have multiple instances of Visual Studio open at one time (which I'm not quite sure why you would need to do this), your changes are "synchronized" across all instances of Visual Studio. Don't do your check-in from the solution explorer, do it from the Source Control explorer, then you're sure to get all your updates in a single check-in.

Answer 2

Use the Pending Changes window. View -> Other Windows -> Pending Changes. This has a toolbar option to show only those changes pending for the current solution also. It's the last toolbar button in the Pending Changes window. I usually make this a full document in VS and then memorize the keyboard shortcut to it: ALT+V, E, H. Obviously you could bind your own shortcut, but what fun is that.

Eclipse has a similar perspective/view to Pending Changes, but it's name escapes me and I don't have my Ubuntu VM up at the moment.

Solution Explorer and Source Control Explorer are definitely not my recommendation for check-in activities. I personally like to clear out all of the checkboxes on Pending Changes and then Diff each file. This keeps me from A) waiting too long before a checkin (it sucks to compare 20 files 1 by 1) and B) avoids checking in a change I didn't intend.