TFS 2010 Gated Checkin with Exclusive Checkouts

Question

We are using TFS 2010 with gated checkins. I've got some question about what I think is strange behaviour. Look at the following process:

1. File A is checked out by me exclusively.
2. File A is changed
3. File A is checked in
4. TFS asks to build changes
5. Build started
6. File A is reverted locally to the old version
7. Build succeeded
8. Asks for reconcile -> however during reconcile there are no changes to be made
9. After clicking OK, the File A is checked in with my changes, however my local file is still the old version.

Why does it have this behaviour? This does not seem logical to me. It seems logical until step 8. There it should get the latest version of File A for my local repository. Is this a setting somewhere?

Answer 1

It is my understanding, that Reconcile works by looking at files checked in for the build (shelved, actually), check if the file in your workspace has pending changes, and matches the built version. If they don't match, (ie. you edited in between) it will ask you to merge. If they do match, it will perform an undo, and getting the latest version (which will be the same content, since the TFS server has just checked your changes in).

In other words, if you do not choose to preserve pending changes locally, reconcile won't work and you need to do a get latest manually to get your most recent changes back into your workspace.