Sunday, August 24, 2008

Editing files in VS2008 SP1

As a follow up to a previous post on file handling in VS2005/VS2008, I thought it is worth to mention another big difference coming as part of VS2008 SP1.

Pre-SP1, if you edit a source controlled file that is not a part of currently loaded solution, VS will not prompt you to check out this file (and will not check it out automatically, if that is what you configuration settings).

However, if you work with files in Source Control Explorer in SP1, your experience will be pretty much identical to Solution Explorer experience, even if the file is not part of the current solution. That is, editing file will check it out the file (if that is your VS settings – Source Control Explorer behavior is defined by the same set of settings as Solution Explorer; namely, “Tools->Options->Source Control->Environment” tab).

Together with the change mentioned in my previous post, this small tune-up should significantly decrease the number of local changes that never made it up to the repository (that is, if you are tweaking files locally and modify them out of solution context).

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