A Sandbox is a private workspace that resides on the client machine and mirrors the content of a project on the server. Although it looks and acts like the project it mirrors, a Sandbox is actually a collection of pointers to its real-life counterparts in the master project. Sandboxes allow you to work locally in your own workspace, without interfering with the work of others.

Different types of Sandboxes are available for different types of development.

A variant Sandbox is based on a specific development path of a project. When you create a variant Sandbox, you choose the development path to use. In the variant Sandbox, you can see the current state of the project along that development path and the changes made by other developers using it.

When a variant Sandbox is created for the first time, it is also created for all subprojects, reserving the assigned name as a unique identifier and ensuring no two paths can share the same name.

Conflicts can occur when developers working on different paths need to work on the same revision of a file. For example, one developer could be working in a regular Sandbox that includes utility.dll, version 1.4 and another developer could be working in a variant Sandbox that contains utility.dll, version 1.3. Both versions are stored in the same member history.

To prevent potential conflicts, the first time you check in a member from a variant Sandbox, you are prompted to branch the member history. Branching the member history gives each development path its own copy of the revision.

After major milestones, such as product releases, you might want to recreate a static version of an entire project as it existed at some point in the past. You create a build Sandbox to build or test the project, but not to begin further work along a new development path. Build Sandboxes could be used for quality assurance or production to distribute files in a fixed configuration.

A build Sandbox is a Sandbox associated with a particular project checkpoint and has no development path (since it is static and not meant for further development). No further development can be carried out in a build Sandbox.

For example, if a build manager needed to burn a CD of a special build that did not include a certain feature, he could use an earlier checkpoint to create a build Sandbox on the CD burning system.

Within a build Sandbox, you can:

When you create a build Sandbox, you choose the project checkpoint to base the build Sandbox on.

However, with a build Sandbox, you cannot:

Each of these represents further development, which requires a normal or variant Sandbox.