I recently posted about the Team Foundation Server Update 1 release alongside Visual Studio Update 1, but I also wanted to take some time to call out that we also shipped Update 1 of Team Explorer Everywhere on the same day. There has been a version of our Eclipse and cross-platform tooling available to support every version of Team Foundation Server since we launched TFS 2005 and I’m proud to say that the tradition continues to this day.

Team Explorer Everywhere Update 1 includes:

New Chinese language pack

Originally Team Explorer Everywhere shipped in English only but due to popular demand we added language packs for Japanese, French and German. Last year we added Brazilian Portuguese to that list and in Update 1 we have added a Simplified Chinese language pack and I’m hopeful that people will find this useful.  In previous years we shipped the language pack as a separate download but with update 1 you will find everything you need on our Eclipse update site (http://dl.microsoft.com/eclipse/tfs)

Support for public workspaces

Originally Team Explorer Everywhere only supported Private workspaces, but as the usage of Team Foundation Server on Unix environments grows we’ve been getting more requests from customers to support the TFS concept of public workspaces.  This would allow multiple users to all SSH over to share the same workspace on the same Unix environment and be able to edit and check-in files all from a single public workspace.  There are times when you need to do this which is why we now support it, but please think about it carefully before you chose this particular workflow.  Public workspaces do not let you have a TFS workspace on your PC and just mount it via an SMB share on a Unix machine and check stuff in and out from that environment as a workspace is tied to the machine it is installed on.  Instead what you should do in those cases is have separate workspaces on each machine and use TFS Shelvesets if you want to pass around sets of code changes between a couple of different environments to test your changes before you check them in.

Baseless merge from the UI

While we’ve had branch and merge support in Team Explorer Everywhere for a very long time, we just added support for baseless merges in the Eclipse UI.  With Team Foundation Server 2012’s improved handling of automerge scenarios, baseless merges are a lot easier than they used to be so we figured it was now time to expose this functionality in the UI for Eclipse users.

There have been many small improvements and bug fixes in this release as well. One of my particular favorites is that we’ve made it really easy to copy/paste links to shelvesets around. This is really handy if you are sending a reference to a shelveset to your team for a quick code review etc and works well cross platform where there are many different email clients or tools that you might be using. We also fixed some important bugs due to updates in the platforms that we run on such as an important fix for Mac OS X users wanting to run the very latest version of Oracle’s Java 7 for Mac.

The easiest way to get a hold of the new update is to make sure that you have Eclipse set to install from our Eclipse update site (http://dl.microsoft.com/eclipse/tfs) in which case you probably have the updates before you have even read this post. You can also visit the download page to get the latest cross-platform command line client or a Zip archive of our Eclipse update site.

We continue to invest in our Eclipse and cross-platform tooling and I think you are only going to see more great features coming along in this area soon. I’m looking forward to hearing what you think to these latest updates and what you would like us to look at in the future.

Brian