Herding Code #14 and TFS/VS Phantom Checkouts

Herding Code is a fairly new development podcast hosted by K Scott Allen (OdeToCode), Kevin Dente, Scott Koon (lazycoder) and Jon Galloway. I highly recommend this podcast for Application Developers. It has been an excellent source of information for me.

Episode 14 contains a great interview with Jeff Atwood. Great questions were asked of Jeff as he talked about StackOverflow. He talks about the technologies they are using to build StackOverflow as well as some of the issues they have faced.

Here are some of the points talked about in the podcast –

• Dealing with aging of the answers – filtering out older data
• Productivity of the development community
• StackOverflow questions via Google
• Using LINQ, JQuery, MVC, etc for development
• OpenID for credentials
• Team Foundation Server verses Subversion

Again, there is a lot of information in this podcast, which is why I listened to it twice.

I found the TFS verses Subversion topic interesting because we use TFS at my company. I have always wondered why when I open a solution or project in Visual Studio, there are files checked out that I know I did not touch. From listening to the podcast I gather that there are a few bugs in the VS IDE source control integration. I was talking to a co-worker about this topic and he said that he has VS set to prompt before just arbitrarily checking files out.

The below illustration shows where the option to prompt before checkouts can be changed in VS.

To get to options select Tools > Options from the menu.

Have a great day.