Team Development with Visual Studio Team Foundation Server

change or the destination change, integrate both changes, or manually modify the final
version by typing directly into the file.
After resolving every conflict in the file, save the final version as a pending change to be
checked into the target branch.
Be careful when merging because it is easy to make mistakes that might result in build
instability. After you have finished merging, compile the resulting source and run unit
tests to test for major breaks.
Additional Resources
• For more information about resolving conflicts, see “How to: Resolve Conflicts” at
http://msdn2.microsoft.com/en-us/library/ms181433(VS.80).aspx
How to Avoid Conflicts
To help avoid conflicts:
• Ensure effective team communication. When you work on a source file, let other
team members know that you are working on the file and which aspects you will be
updating. Although automatic conflict resolution can resolve many conflicts, you
should avoid situations where two or more developers are working on the same
functional areas in the same source file where there is a strong likelihood of you both
making changes to the same lines of code. Conflicts on the same lines of code require
manual conflict resolution, which complicates the merge operation.
• Determine who else has a file checked out. Before updating a file, check to see if
another team member has already checked out the file. If so, ask your colleague what
he or she is working on and then decide if you can wait until they complete their
changes or if it is safe to continue to work in parallel on the same file because you are
working on separate functionality in separate source code regions within the file.
To view pending changes
1. In Source Control Explorer, right-click the solution, project, folder, or file for
which you want to see pending changes.
2. Select View Pending Changes.
This method shows you all of the pending changes within the scope you have selected.
You can also use the command-line checkout tool as follows to learn about pending
changes:
tf status /format:detailed /user:*
This command displays detailed status information about any pending changes made by
all users. In the resulting list, you can see who has which files checked out, along with
pending changes. To view the pending changes for a specific file, specify the filename as
the first argument to tf.exe.