Back in November I wrote about the first Beta of Team Explorer Everywhere 2010 SP1, and today I am proud to announce that the final version is available to download for MSDN Subscribers.

**UPDATE 2/11/11** – the publicly available download (for licensed Team Explorer Everywhere customers) is now available: http://www.microsoft.com/downloads/en/details.aspx?FamilyID=53c27216-c4f0-48b6-9bed-fe1718a2e3b0

See my previous post for more information about what shipped in Beta 1.  The feedback from the Beta was very good, so the team took the opportunity to add in a few new features into the final release based on the feedback.

The Eclipse plug-in has always been highly regarded, but some customers wanted to use the plug-in to manage applications in a stand-alone client on non-windows systems (exactly how they might use Team Explorer on Windows today) – even though they were not developing in an Eclipse based IDE.  To do this you simply install the plug-in into the Eclipse Platform Runtime Binary (a cut down version of Eclipse without all the language tools for code editing etc).  In the final release of SP1 we’ve made this a better experience with the following features

Auto-connect on Start-up

If a Team Explorer view is displayed in your current perspective in Eclipse, then this will connect automatically to your last TFS connection.  You can disable this if you prefer using the Eclipse preference under Team, Team Foundation Server

Fast Workspace Switching

Previously in the Eclipse plug-in there was a binding of one TFS workspace per Eclipse workspace.  In SP1 you can now quickly switch workspaces from the workspace management drop-down in the Pending Changes view.  You can also manage workspaces and working folder mappings from here.

Source Control Explorer Improvements

We made a bunch usability improvements around mapping, unmapping and cloaking of folders in TFS using Source Control Explorer.  We also added a link to the path label that will open the local folder in your file explorer (i.e. Explorer on Windows or Finder on Mac etc).

There are many other things that we’ve accomplished with this release not as visible including improving the Kerberos support on non-Windows platforms.

If you are a Team Explorer Everywhere customer, then please download SP1 as soon as you can and let us know what you think.  If you haven’t tried Team Explorer Everywhere before then now is the time to try – the Team Explorer Everwhere SP1 release is a full release so you can just install the SP1 bits (no need to install the initial 2010 release first).

Later this year we will be releasing a language pack to provide Japanese, French and German versions of Team Explorer Everywhere 2010 SP1 and we will continue to invest in our Eclipse and cross-platform support.

Brian