Find shelvesets via Visual Studio as quickly as possible

Question

I need to review many shelvesets using Visual Studio every day. I have added the TfsPendingChanges command to the my toolbar, but the rest of the procedure to access a shelveset (Actions/Find Shelvesets) still feels clumsy. In fact, shelveset review has nothing to do with my own pending changes. And VS11 just made it even one step longer than it already was.

Is there any way to add "Find Shelvesets" in some form directly to a menu or to a toolbar, in Visual Studio 2012?

Answer 1

If you go to right click and then "Customize" on any toolbar, it will bring up a dialog. Press the "Keyboard" button on it, choose File.TfsUnShelvePendingChanges and assign a Hot Key to it. I do believe that the Source Control Explorer window needs to be open and active for your hot key to work.

OR...This may not be exactly what you are looking for, but if you have the Source Control Explorer window open and active, then ALT-F ALT-R ALT-F ALT-F ALT-S will bring up the dialog. That is actually navigating File/Source Control/Find/Find Shelvesets.

Answer 2

The easiest way to work with Shelvesets is to use the new My Work feature. By suspending and resuming work Visual Studio will automatically do all the Shelveset magic for you with a simple drag/drop of the task that you want to have in progress.

The same applies to reviews, Suspend your current work, or create a new temporary workspace, open the Review Request, let it unshelve the changes automatically and when you're done go back to where you were by resuming your previous tasks.

It's really great once you get the hang of it. That it uses Shelvesets under the hood is nice to know, but this way you don't really need to know, it just works.

As for TWA Diff, there've been great improvements with TFS 2012 Update 2 which is almost ready to be released...