VSTS Offline Checkout

Many titles would have been appropriate for this post.  Here are a couple
off the top of my head.

My First Real Gripe About VS Team System

How to Aggravate Me Beyond Belief

Basics Before Farkle

800 of the Longest Miles of My Life

I traveled from Boise, Idaho, to Ogden, Utah, and back again yesterday with my
wife and another equally verbose woman.  I planned to spend the 800ish mile
round trip pecking happily away at my latest little project, which I have no doubt
will cause our competitors to tremble in mortal fear.

Opening Visual Studio was a happy experience, as always, and I couldn’t help but smile
as I felt reasonably secure that the Wireless pirate going down the freeway next to
me would get no play as he tried to leech into my PC’s hotspot.  I’m running
Vista, after all.

I worked for a half hour or so until I tried to do a refactoring (another lovely little
feature of VS2005) in the form of a rename for a method.  I had done this many
times already, but in this case, a reference was being made to my method in a
code file that I had not checked out for edit before leaving my VPN connection at
home.

Boom

“Oh.   No problem,” I thought.  “I’ll just use an offline checkout. 
Hmm.  Doesn’t seem to be here.  Not in the context menu.  Well, is
it hidden in the Source Control Manager menus? No…”

I can’t really be upset.  The things that are in VSTS have been
rock solid thus far and I would much rather have fewer defect-free features than
lots of buggy ones.  But geeeeezzzz, I really want that offline checkout capability. 
Pleeeeeeeazzzzz?  Release a service pack so I don’t have to wait for
a new version.  Please?

I realize that this is a backhanded compliment.  I am sure that the feature will
get there soon enough, but I just really want it.

You may be wondering if I was stupid enough to think I couldn’t code anymore. No. 
Just go to your file system and make your code files write-able.  You can then
overwrite them to save on top of your local files.  You must be very careful
when bringing all this back together for a checkin, though.  Make sure you check
out the files you modified without getting a local copy, then check in your changes.

If you want to merge locally first, it will probably be more difficult, but make a
copy first, no matter what you do.