I was on site with a customer recently when I was asked why Visual Studio would automatically check out project files when getting latest (or specific) from TFS.

I had a look and, sure enough, there were 3 project files checked out with pending changes. The first thing they tried was to undo the pending changes (meaning the project files were no longer checked out) but then the minute they got latest, or even tried to build the project, VS would check out those project files.

I checked with some of the other developers and, unbeknownst to them, they had the same projects checked out too. Weird.

So, we did a Compare to see what, exactly, VS was doing to these files and it turned out that Visual Studio was fixing a bad HintPath in the project. Changing it from an absolute path (that was invalid on this machine) to a relative one. Wow!

Now this seems like a missed opportunity to me. I am pretty impressed that Visual Studio can do this (and still not sure quite how it does it). If only VS had prompted the user with something like this: