What is Shelving in TFS?

Question

Is shelving in TFS merely a soft checkin so other team members can see the source code?

i.e. the shelved code will not be compiled right?

Answer 1

@JaredPar: Yes you can use Shelvesets for reviews but keep in mind that shelvesets can be overwritten by yourself/others and therefore are not long term stable. Therefore for regulatory relevant reviews you should never use a Shelveset as base but rather a checkin (Changeset). For an informal review it is ok but not for a formal (E.g. FTA relevant) review!

Answer 2

Shelving has many uses. The main ones are:

1. Context Switching: Saving the work on your current task so you can switch to another high priority task. Say you're working on a new feature, minding your own business, when your boss runs in and says "Ahhh! Bug Bug Bug!" and you have to drop your current changes on the feature and go fix the bug. You can shelve your work on the feature, fix the bug, then come back and unshelve to work on your changes later.
2. Sharing Changesets: If you want to share a changeset of code without checking it in, you can make it easy for others to access by shelving it. This could be used when you are passing an incomplete task to someone else (poor soul) or if you have some sort of testing code you would never EVER check in that someone else needed to run. h/t to the other responses about using this for reviews, it is a very good idea.
3. Saving your progress: While you're working on a complex feature, you may find yourself at a 'good point' where you would like to save your progress. This is an ideal time to shelve your code. Say you are hacking up some CSS / HTML to fix rendering bugs. Usually you bang on it, iterating every possible kludge you can think up until it looks right. However, once it looks right you may want to try and go back in to cleanup your markup so that someone else may be able to understand what you did before you check it in. In this case, you can shelve the code when everything renders right, then you are free to go and refactor your markup, knowing that if you accidentally break it again, you can always go back and get your changeset.

Any other uses?