Team Foundation Server (TFS) has a great feature called shelving. It allows you store a copy of your source code changes on the TFS server. Please note that this is different from checking in the code, because the copy is set aside temporarily or shelved under your userid. Since the code is not checked in you can be confident it is not going to break your team's nightly or continuous build.

There are several ways to shelve your changes. The easiest way to do it is from Visual Studio, click on your Pending Changes window, and select the files and click Shelf button. In the dialog window that opens up enter a Shelveset Name and click Shelve. If you give a Shelveset Name that is already existing it will ask for confirmation to overwrite it.

For unshelving, open Pending changes window in Visual Studio and click Unshelve. By default it will show you all the shelvesets for your userid. Click on the self set name from the list and click Unshelve. It will bring down your shelved code files to your local workspace automatically check it out from the TFS server.

For more ways including command line to do shelving and unshelving look at the MSDN documentation here.

Some of the uses of Shelf feature are:

• Set aside temporarily a feature or some code change that you are working, because you are now assigned a different task or a bug to fix.
• Collaboration on a code change. Say you are working on a code change and you need some extra information from another team member to finish it. You can shelf your code and have your team member unshelf it and provide the extra information and check it in.
• Use it for code review purposes before checking it in for build.
• Use it as a personal code change backup. I normally give a shelfset name of bkp (because I am lazy), and allow the confirmation dialog to overwrite my existing backup. You still have to remember to manually do this though. I have made it a practice to do this before I leave for the day. May be I will automate this some day and blog about it.

For more information about shelving and unshelving look at MSDN documentation here. There is also a 10 min video here that gives you a hands on approach.