Visual Studio 2005 – Source Control Warnings (or lack thereof)

I’ve just had to apologise to my peers for breaking the build (thankfully not something that happens often).  I encountered an interesting situation where writeable files don’t show as such (a build script had ‘got latest’ but left files writeable).  I then made some changes and performed an incomplete checkin as half of the changed items weren’t checked out.  Visual Studio interestingly showed all of the files as ‘locked’ even though they were writeable.  VS2003 used to detect that and give you a different type of ‘tick’ to show the file was writeable but not checked out (I think 🙂 ).


‘Silly boy’ – I hear you cry – yes I should have done a get latest before checking in (but didn’t – my bad).  This does highlight however the Source Control settings available in the Tools–>Options dialog.  We enforce Checkin comments (through a VSS Addin) and so for safety (knowing what VS2005 is doing with VSS) it’s always worth ensuring the following are enforced:



  • Prompt before checkout
  • Prompt before checkin (to allow comments)
  • Don’t allow editing of checked-in items
  • Checked-in item behaviour

    • On Save – prompt for checkout
    • On Edit  – prompt for checkout

I’d changed some of these items in the past week but some had reverted to previous settings (a little concerning!!).


Anyway – it’s all good – the build passed and I’m a little wiser about what options to tick in future.