The closest equivalent to shelving in Subversion is creating a branch and switching to it, fixing your “work in progress”, and then moving to the outside line. Later you can merge with this “offshore branch” to return to where you were. When you evaluate TFS and Subversion before using any of them in anger, I expected the racks to be really convenient, and the ability that I would miss in Subversion, but I found that branching and switching in Subversion are so simple which is actually faster than using a shelf anyway.